Library › A. N. Mouravieff › History of the Church of Russia

History of the Church of Russia

A. N. Mouravieff, tr. Blackmore, 1842

5. Period During Which the Metropolitans Resided at Moscow

XXVI. Theognostes

At the death of St. Peter, who was laid as an immovable foundation-stone of the metropolitical see in Moscow, Theognostes came from the patriarch as metropolitan, and settled himself in the residence of his predecessor; Kalita¹ alone could afford him a refuge in his peaceful principality: Galich had fallen, Kieff was already in the hands of Hedimine. Though a Greek by birth, Theognostes entered perfectly into the mutual relations of the Great Princes and those of the appanages; and during the whole of his twenty years’ episcopate he steadily co-operated with John and his son Simeon the Proud in all their undertakings, by which he greatly assisted them towards the aggrandisement of the principality of Moscow; for the spiritual authority being always on the side of the Great Prince gave him a great preponderance. Thus Theognostes accompanied John in his expedition to Pskoff, when it refused to allow the departure of Alexander prince of Tver, though his presence had been required in the Horde, and overcame the resistance of the citizens by the terror of an ecclesiastical interdict, so preventing a renewal of the desolating ravages of the Mongols. On more than one other occasion, the turbulent city of Novogorod was reconciled to the Great Prince through his mediation. But his continual journeys through the widely-separated dioceses of Russia were burdensome to the clergy, and eventually even caused a complaint to be lodged by Moses the Lord of Novogorod with the patriarch.

In ecclesiastical matters Theognostes shewed remarkable firmness. When the holy Archbishop Moses, in spite of the entreaties of the popular Assembly, had retired from the throne of St. Sophia, the citizens of Novogorod sent Basil, whom they had elected to supply his place, for Consecration to Vladimir in Volhynia, where the metropolitan then was; the inhabitants of Pskoff also, wishing to have a bishop to themselves, sent thither for the same end a certain Arsenius: but notwithstanding all their entreaties, and the requisition of the powerful heathen prince Hedimine, who had become master of Volhynia, Theognostes could not be persuaded to violate the order² of the Church. The Lithuanian prince respected the dignity of the metropolitan; he wished however to get possession of the person of the archbishop, but he took to flight, and saved himself by largesses from the danger of being pursued.

Basil was one of the most illustrious of the Lords of Novogorod, equally skilled in the management of civil and of ecclesiastical affairs. He did much to beautify the cathedral of St. Sophia, and through his relations of friendship with the metropolitan he had nothing to fear in his province from the Great Prince. Magnus, king of Sweden, being very zealous for the conversion of Novogorod to the Latin Church, entreated Basil to hold conference concerning the Faith with his ambassadors; but the Lord prudently declined entering into controversy, and referred them to the patriarch. The Patriarch Philotheus himself, in token of respect for his merit, sent him a blessing of some Vestments covered with crosses, and a white cowl³, inasmuch as he had been consecrated to the episcopal order from the White Clergy⁴; and the use of this cowl passed afterwards to the metropolitans, probably when some or other of them were translated to Moscow from having been Lords of Novogorod.

The metropolitan, striving to eradicate those abuses which had crept into the monasteries from their subjection to the Tartar yoke, stood up firmly himself in the Horde for the right of the clergy, and even suffered persecution for their sake. It was a curious circumstance that Khanibek the son of Uzbek, demanded of him to be freed from the obligation of those Letters of exemption and privilege, which had been granted by his father to St. Peter; as he wished to impose a tribute on the clergy, but dared not to break his father’s word. The metropolitan here also maintained his high character; by personal gifts he saved himself from the wrath of the khan, while he preserved for the future the privileges of the Church.

The black vomiting, a kind of plague which raged at this time in Russia and over all Europe, carried off in one year the Great Prince Simeon⁵ with his family, the Metropolitan Theognostes, and the Archbishop Basil. In place of Basil the citizens of Novogorod again brought in Moses, though now habited in the Schema, from his retirement. Three bishops assisted at the funeral of the Metropolitan Theognostes, and buried him, near the tomb of his holy predecessor, in the cathedral of the Assumption: these were, Athanasius of Volhynia, who had been expelled from his diocese by the prince of Lithuania; another Athanasius, first bishop of the re-established diocese of Columna; and St. Alexis, of the noble family of Plescheeff, who had been for the preceding twelve years vicar to the metropolitan, first in Kieff, and then afterwards in Vladimir and Moscow, during his frequent absences.

St. Alexis

Providence, which had chosen Alexis from his early years to be exercised in spiritual labours, strengthened him in his advanced age for the salvation of his country through a stormy period, under the feeble rule of John II., and during the minority of his son Demetrius. The Horde still threatening in the East; on the West the growing power of Lithuania under Olgerd, who had gradually wrested from us our ancient inheritance; within, the turbulent independence of Novogorod and Pskoff, and the rivalry of the three powerful principalities of Tver, Riazan, and Souzdal, the sovereigns of which each assumed the title of Great Prince; such was the political storm which Alexis had to oppose, and during the course of a primacy of twenty-four years he may truly be said to have taken the helm of the empire. He preserved for Demetrius till he came of age that inheritance, which his proud uncle had left to his weak father.

The unlooked-for arrival of Theodoret, a self-elected pretender, sent by the patriarch of Bulgaria⁶, to claim the metropolitical chair of Russia, even before Theognostes was yet dead, put it into the mind of that prelate, with the approbation of the Great Prince, to ask the patriarch of Constantinople, Philotheus, to allow him to nominate Alexis as his successor. The consent of the patriarch arrived only after their deaths. But the new metropolitan had scarcely time to return from Constantinople, whither they had summoned him for Institution, when he heard that another metropolitan, named Romanus, had been consecrated for Russia by the will of the same patriarch; and he was obliged to undertake a second toilsome journey into Greece. However there was not one single diocese in Russia which would receive Romanus; he remained in Volhynia, where the Lithuanian princes had no wish that the pale of their conquests should continue subject to the spiritual authority of the metropolitans of Moscow.

The sanctity of Alexis soon became conspicuous even in the Horde itself. The khan, Khanibek, asked John to send him the chief pastor of Russia, whose prayers, he said, God never refused to grant, that he might heal his consort Taidoula of her sickness⁷; and Alexis, after having prayed at the tomb of the Metropolitan Peter, who had himself had the grace of miracles⁸, departed with a firm faith for the Horde, and healed the sick. Extraordinary favour, and new Letters of privilege and exemption to the clergy, were a proof of the gratitude of the khan; but very soon after this, the troubles which broke out in the Horde on occasion of the murder of Khanibek by his son, obliged the metropolitan to go again to the Mongols. There in the presence of the ferocious Berdibek, he undauntedly maintained the rights of the principality of Moscow; and through the intercession of the mother of the khan, whom he had recovered from her sickness, he was again dismissed with honour.

After this, Alexis never went beyond the limits of the Empire⁹, but within it he was a strict reformer of the morals both of clergy and laity, whom he endeavoured to enlighten; at the same time he was peace-maker amongst the princes, and in the absence of Demetrius¹⁰, who ever had recourse to his prudence for counsel, he presided in the court of the boyars, giving a preponderating influence to the Great Princedom over the other appanages. In vain did Demetrius, prince of Souzdal, who for a time bore the title of Great Prince, invite the prelate to himself to Vladimir; he refused to quit the tomb of The Wonder-worker, that is, of his predecessor St. Peter, and the youthful son of John¹¹. He roused the fallen spirits of the citizens of the infant capital on the terrible invasion of Olgerd, and by this unlooked-for firmness frustrated his ambitious plans. The former capital of Kieff also, then subject to a foreign prince, Alexis would have raised up, if possible, from the desolation of those ruins, under which her ancient glories lay buried. The princes of Tver, who were at variance, the uncle against his nephews, and were dissatisfied with the judgment of Basil their own bishop, betook themselves to the arbitration of Alexis; and he kept with him at his court, as a pledge, a young relative of theirs, whom Demetrius had redeemed from captivity in the Horde. He interfered with equal authority and effect in a family feud between the two brother princes of Souzdal, the younger of whom had unfairly got possession of Nijny Novogorod: in order to compel them to be reconciled, he laid an interdict upon their capital by the lips of the meek hermit Sergius.

With the name of Sergius a new monastic world opens itself in the North. The commencement of his lonely hermitage in the woods near Moscow, is a point of as much importance in our history as the excavation of the caves of Anthony on the banks of the Dnieper; for he was destined to divide with Anthony the glory of having been the father of monasticism in Russia. Sergius was born in Rostoff; when yet quite young he left the house of his parents, and together with his brother Stephen, settled himself in the thick woods in the neighbourhood of Radonege, where, however, he was soon left by his brother. In this wild solitude he resisted all manner of temptations, and lived among the wild beasts of the forest, until the report of his holy life drew disciples around him: they compelled him to go to Peryaslavla-Zalessky, to receive the holy order of priesthood from Athanasius, the bishop of Volhynia, who lived there. Sergius built by his own labour in the midst of the forest a wooden church, by the name of The Source of Life, the everblessed Trinity¹², which has since grown into that glorious Lavra, whose destiny has become inseparable from the destinies of the capital, and from whence on so many occasions the salvation of all Russia has proceeded.

Prelates and princes applied to Sergius not only for the sake of his spiritual instructions, but also to receive from him teachers, who had been trained to perfection by his converse in solitude, and who in their turn might be capable of influencing others by their good example: for from the appearance of Sergius there began among us, as it were, a second era and development of monasticism; and in the fulness of its light our unhappy country, which had been suffering so long under the plague of the Tartars, revived. Thus at the request of Vladimir the brother of the Great Prince, Athanasius, a disciple of Sergius, founded the Visotsky monastery at Serpouchoff; and another of his pupils, Sabba, laid the foundation of the convent of Svenigorod, while his nephew Theodore laid that of the Simonoff in Moscow. The Saint himself chose the site for him, on the picturesque banks of the river, within view of the capital; and gave the Great Prince his blessing to begin building at Columna the Goloutvin monastery¹³, as a memorial of the victory which he had gained upon the Don. At the very moment of that decisive battle, which first shook the empire of the Mongols over Russia, the aged saint was supporting Demetrius by his prayer; his two monks, Peresvet and Osliab¹⁴, fought in the ranks, with the Schema under their coats of mail; and Peresvet began the engagement by a single combat with a gigantic Tartar, the champion of the Horde. He sealed with his blood the approaching deliverance of Russia, and was the precursor of those hero-monks of the Trinity Lavra, who so gloriously distinguished themselves in other days of no less danger and distress to their country. The bodies of Peresvet and Osliab were laid as the foundation of the Simonoff monastery, when it was first built, on the original site¹⁵.

The Metropolitan Alexis himself founded many monasteries: the magnificent Choudoff¹⁶, in the centre of the Kremlin; and, without its walls, one for nuns, by the name of his angel; another at Vladimir, the former capital, called after the Emperor Constantine; and a fourth in Nijny Novogorod, on the banks of the Volga, called the Pechersky or Cave monastery, in memory of the caves of Anthony upon the Dnieper; and he too, like others, applied to Sergius to give him one of his disciples, when he was founding the Andronieff monastery in Moscow, in fulfilment of a vow which he had made during his tempestuous voyage to Constantinople. But when the primate, being now eighty-four years of age, and full of energy to the last, perceived his end to be approaching, and wished to give Sergius his blessing and appoint him to be his successor, the humble monk, in great alarm, declared that he could not accept nor wear the costly Panagia¹⁷, which the primate had sent him from his own person. “From my youth upwards,” he answered humbly, “I have never possessed nor worn gold, and now much more in my old age I am anxious to remain in poverty.” St. Alexis had good reason for wishing to lose no time in choosing himself a successor beforehand; for even during his life the same Patriarch Philotheus, who has been mentioned above, had consecrated another metropolitan named Cyprian, a Servian by birth, probably in the room of Romanus, who was deceased; but he was not acknowledged by Demetrius; so he remained in Kieff, where he resided till the death of his predecessor, and during those disturbances of the Church which broke out after it.

Scarcely had the incorrupt remains of St. Alexis been deposited in the Choudoff monastery of his own foundation, when Mitai, archimandrite of the Simonoff and confessor to the Great Prince, who had originally belonged to the White or Secular Clergy, and had only recently received the tonsure, presuming upon his favour in high quarters, boldly took possession of the metropolitical palace¹⁸, and began to regulate the affairs of the Church as if he were now himself the primate¹⁹. He demanded his own Consecration in Moscow from a synod of Russian bishops; but Dionysius of Souzdal and St. Sergius strenuously opposed this infraction of ecclesiastical order, especially as Alexis himself, before his death, notwithstanding the entreaties of Demetrius, had absolutely refused to give his benediction to Mitai as his successor.

Sergius had tried to turn the attention of the Great Prince upon Dionysius, as having been the favourite disciple of the deceased metropolitan, to whom he had in times past intrusted his Pechersky monastery; and to save him from the persecutions of the pretender Mitai, and from bonds and imprisonment, he even became himself surety for him, and took him into his own keeping. Dionysius, however, did not reverence as he ought to have done the aged saint, but made his escape and fled secretly to Constantinople. On this Mitai also, fearing lest the patriarch should invest his rival with the dignity of metropolitan, set forth and sailed with a splendid retinue for the same destination, but died at sea within view of the Grecian capital. The Archimandrite Pimen, who attended him, made his own advantage of the letters of the Great Prince to the emperor and the Patriarch Nilus, and fraudulently obtained Consecration. Demetrius, enraged at this villainous proceeding, put him into confinement at Tver; and sent the Archimandrite Theodore, the nephew of St. Sergius, to Kieff, to invite Cyprian to take possession of the metropolitical throne of all Russia.

XXVIII. Cyprian

This occurred in the year of the celebrated battle with Mamai²⁰, which covered with eternal glory the hero of the Don. The victory of Koulikoff came after a century and a half as the avenging reverberation of the disastrous slaughter on the Kalka; but still Russia had not as yet any rest from calamity. Two years after this the destructive invasion of the Khan Toktamuish again covered her eastern provinces with desolation, and the children of the traitor Oleg, prince of Riazan, introduced the Tartars into the Kremlin of Moscow, which had been left by the Great Prince and the metropolitan. Cyprian’s absenting himself from the seditious capital just before the invasion, and his residence at Tver with the Prince Michael, son of Alexander, the rival of Demetrius, excited the displeasure of the Great Prince, and obliged him to remove back again to Kieff. Pimen was taken out of confinement, and occupied his place in Moscow, though for no long period, as he was obliged to go to Constantinople, at the citation of the patriarch, to be there judged with Cyprian, who refused to yield up to him his right.

In the mean time a third metropolitan appeared; Dionysius, who had been consecrated bishop of Souzdal by St. Alexis, obtained in Constantinople the rank of archbishop, and notwithstanding that his having gone thither unsent was against him, he nevertheless, by his pastoral virtues and by his eloquence, obtained the respect both of the Great Prince and of the people, and they devoutly received at his hands the holy Icons and relics which he had brought from the East. He quieted the discontent of the clergy and laity of Novogorod, where they murmured at the great sums which were demanded of them at Ordinations, and procured certain definite fees to be fixed by a patriarchal rescript, which he brought to Alexis the Lord of Novogorod. The same disturbance had already once before manifested itself, on occasion of the heresy of the Strigolniks²¹, who rejected the Ordination of Priests as practised by the Church. Dionysius visited Constantinople a second time, in company with Theodore, the confessor of the Great Prince, and, probably with his consent, sought and obtained for himself the rank of metropolitan, for Demetrius never liked Pimen; but as he was on his return home, Vladimir, son of Olgerd and prince of Kieff, who took part with Cyprian, arrested and detained Dionysius as uncanonically appointed during the lifetime of another metropolitan; and he died in Kieff, and was buried there in the catacombs of the Lavra.

At length Pimen, who had been once more cited to Constantinople to appear in the court of the Patriarch Anthony, died at Chalcedon, and his rival was left alone the undisputed metropolitan of all Russia. Basil, the son of Demetrius of the Don, his father being now dead, received the primate with great honour in Moscow, where he arrived, accompanied by two Greek metropolitans and seven Russian bishops. Three of them, Theodore, Euphrosynus, and Isakius, had been severally raised in Constantinople to the rank of archbishops, of Rostoff, Souzdal, and Chernigoff, and so for that time the division which had taken place in the unity of the Church was at an end.

Cyprian recalled to mind by his character the great Cyrill, who had done so much for the improvement and consolidation of Russia. With equal abilities for the administration of ecclesiastical and of civil affairs, he was, during his episcopate of eighteen years, in the full sense of the word metropolitan of all Russia, notwithstanding the cruel separation between Lithuania and Moscow. His former residence of fifteen years in Kieff, had gained him the affection of all the bishops beyond the Dnieper, and the respect of Olgerd himself, who had been converted to Christianity by his consort Mary, born a princess of Tver. That residence indeed, and his influence afterwards, were the main causes of the preservation of orthodoxy throughout the whole of the southern districts; for Pope Gregory XI., at the request of Louis, king of Poland, had already erected four Latin dioceses in Peremuishla, Kholma, Vladimir, and Lvoff. We may well suppose that the true cause of the appointments of Romanus and Cyprian as metropolitans for the South of Russia during the life of Alexis, was the anxiety of the patriarchs lest the preservation of the purity of the faith should be endangered in those parts.

Although the governors of Lithuania in Kieff still continued to profess the orthodox Faith, the Great Prince himself, Yagello the son of Olgerd, having been elected king of Poland, was baptized together with all his people by Roman priests; and his successor in Lithuania, the powerful Vitoft, also embracing the Latin confession, exceedingly promoted its dissemination in Wilna and Volhynia; and in Kieff itself there was founded a monastery of Dominicans. Nevertheless, both Yagello and Vitoft respected the dignity and character of the Metropolitan Cyprian, who on his part prudently did all that was in his power to conciliate them; they made no attempt to withdraw their subjects from his spiritual authority, nor did he, after his removal to Moscow, ever discontinue his visits to Kieff and Lithuania. The bond of a family connection between the Great Princes promoted their accord in respect of the affairs of the Church. Sophia the daughter of Vitoft, had been given in marriage to Basil; and Cyprian being charged on one occasion to conduct the Great Princess to Wilna to visit her father, took the opportunity while there of ordaining bishops and regulating the affairs of the Church, and forewarned his sovereign of the designs of the Lithuanians, on the occasion of his having for the second time an interview with Vitoft and Yagello.

Not less prudent was his administration of affairs within the dominions of Moscow. Feeling deeply the immense importance of unity to the Church, he strove with all his might to re-establish in Novogorod the rights of the hierarchy, which had been violated and set aside during the feeble administration of Pimen by the self-willed independency of the Assembly. For they had refused to be subject to the superior court of the metropolitans, that they might escape paying to it the customary dues, and were for giving the final decision in all spiritual matters to their own Lord. But the first attempt of Cyprian was unsuccessful, and he left without his benediction the rebellious citizens, who shewed no respect even to the rescript of the patriarch. The Great Prince himself engaged in this affair, which partly affected his own government, as the subordination of Novogorod to the spiritual authority of the primate made it more dependent on Moscow than it would else have been in civil affairs. The Assembly was brought to reason, though only for a short time; new disturbances on their part caused a war, and the good archbishop, John, suffered imprisonment in the Choudoff monastery for the disobedience of his flock: Tver and Riazan were in harmony with Moscow, while Souzdal, ever since the times of Demetrius of the Don, had been reckoned as part of its province. Cyprian, on the petition of Michael prince of Tver, who was his friend, consecrated in the room of Euphemius bishop of that city, who had been deprived, St. Arsenius, a man distinguished for his piety, who founded near Tver the Jeltikoff monastery, where his uncorrupted body still lies. Oleg, the prince of Riazan, had been at length reconciled to the Great Prince after the invasion of Toktamuish by the entreaties of St. Sergius, who softened completely and for ever the enmity of his heart. Both the illustrious rivals of Demetrius, Michael and Oleg, ended their days about the same time, as monks, and in alliance with his son; and with them the glory of their principalities was extinguished.

In the reign of Basil, died also at an extremely advanced age that great defender of his country, Sergius, amidst the blessings of his contemporaries, which were soon changed into prayers for his intercession, when his uncorrupted relics were found. His disciple, the holy Hegumen Nikon, discovered them as he was building the stone church of the Holy Trinity after the destructive invasion of Edigee, and deposited them in it as a support and strength to his Lavra, which from that time forth was never touched by so much as one of those calamities which fell upon the neighbouring city of Moscow²². Another great pledge of the safety of the capital was brought into it, to the cathedral of the Assumption, from the former residence of the Great Prince, Vladimir, at a time when another dreadful invasion was threatening. The conqueror of the East, Tamerlane, suddenly fell upon the Horde, and having broken the power of Toktamuish²³, advanced rapidly into the interior of our country, giving up every thing to fire and sword. The Great Prince with his army awaited him on the banks of the Oka; the metropolitan with the citizens went out in procession to meet the ancient Icon of the Mother of God, and to receive it into Moscow; and on that same day Tamerlane turned back, and drew off his army²⁴. The Sretensky monastery, that is, The Monastery of the Meeting, was built in Moscow in commemoration of the deliverance of Russia, which has ever since kept the 26th of August as a festival.

Many religious houses began to appear in the North from the time of St. Alexis, and during all the long primacy of Cyprian. In Souzdal, a disciple of the Archbishop Dionysius, St. Euphemius, founded his celebrated monastery of the Saviour; and in Moscow, Eudocia, the pious widow of the hero of the Don, received the tonsure by the name of Eupraxia in the convent of The Ascension²⁵, which she had founded in the Kremlin. There she was buried, and the same church from that time forth became the burying-place of the illustrious house of Moscow for all the Grand Princesses and their daughters, whose tombs are ranged side by side, beginning with hers. But that which became more celebrated than all the rest was the convent of Bielo-ozero²⁶, founded by St. Cyrill, a disciple and companion of St. Sergius, and monk of the Simonoff monastery. Thirsting after a retreat of absolute quiet, he secluded himself on the silent shores of the White lake; but such a light as his could not remain hid under the bushel; his monastery grew and flourished, even like that of St. Sergius, and became an object of the deepest reverence to our Tsars, especially to John the Terrible. In its turn it became the seed-bed of other houses, which sprang up around it, both near and afar off. From the white waters of its lake, St. Sabbatius carried the germ of monasticism to the grey waves of the Northern ocean; there, in the uninhabited islands of the White sea, his fellow-labourer Germanus, and his successor St. Zosimus laid the foundations of the Solovetskay²⁷ Lavra, which has stood as a glorious boundary of our country to the North, and illumined all the coasts of the sea with the light of Christianity.

Other monasteries, though less celebrated than these two, which are of the highest rank, produced, no less than these, the same beneficial effects on their wild neighbourhoods. Not far from Bielo-ozero, one of the princes of that place discovered a whole community of monks on a desolate and rocky island of the Koubensky lake, who occupied themselves solely with preaching the word of God to the savage tribes of the Choudes²⁸. Their pious zeal extended even still further to the North. The Monk Lazarus founded his monastery of the Assumption on the shores of the Onega lake, for the conversion of the Lopars²⁹; and at the same time the monks of Balaam, on the Ladoga, enlightened by holy Baptism the neighbouring Carelians. Not only the spiritual instruction, but even the occupation itself and colonization of the northern and eastern districts of Russia were effected by the multiplication of religious houses, which were scattered in all parts, and around which inhabitants immediately began to plant themselves, attracted by the advantage of those exemptions which were granted to the Church, with its property and retainers, by the Letters of the khans, and by that freedom from civil jurisdiction which had been all along conceded to the clergy by their native princes. Thus every monastery which extended our boundary became the nucleus of a new pale of settlements, and even a stronghold of defence in case of any attack from barbarous tribes. Great Perm, whither the hunters of Novogorod before went for their furs, was acquired to Russia by a single monk, through the preaching of the Name of Christ. St. Stephen, penetrated with an apostolic zeal, felt his heart pained at the gross heathenism of the inhabitants of Perm; and having thoroughly known their tongue from a child, he invented letters for it. He went alone to preach Christ in the deep and silent woods of Perm, and by faith overcame all the opposition of the heathen priests, who were his enemies. He founded for them their first church, a poor and simple structure, on the river Viuma, and from thence, by little and little, the doctrine of salvation was spread abroad. He himself was consecrated to be bishop of Perm by the hands of the Metropolitan Pimen, and after many years of labour, departed this life in Moscow, where his holy relics are still preserved in the cathedral of the Saviour.

The Metropolitan Cyprian, the great contemporary of so many holy athletes, departed this life, to the deep regret of the Great Prince and of all his widely-extended flock, in his favourite village of Golenischeff, near Moscow, where in mature old age he sought repose from the troubles of life. There he consecrated his hours of solitude to the task of writing an account of the holy lives of his two predecessors, Peter and Alexis, and to the making of a collection of the chronicles of his adopted country, which have been preserved to us under the title of the Books of the Genealogies; for this great churchman was at the same time wisely zealous for the promotion of learning and enlightenment. Before his easy and tranquil departure, he composed a touching testamentary exhortation to his flock, in which forgiving all who might have offended him, he himself humbly in turn asked forgiveness of all, and ordered that it should be read over his grave. After his example all the subsequent metropolitans of Moscow have been used to leave behind them similar testamentary exhortations.

XXIX. Photius

For three years after the death of Cyprian there was no metropolitan in Russia, till the Patriarch Matthew sent Photius, who had been consecrated from the strict monks of the country of Amorrhæa. His arrival, first at Kieff, and afterwards at Moscow, took place just at the afflictive period of the Tartar ravages, to which our country was again subjected. The Horde, which had been divided by the quarrels between the families of Timur and Toktamuish, was still powerful under the rule of Edigee, who, like Mamai³⁰, disposed of the destiny of the khans. He wished to humble the Great Prince; for the prudent Basil, taking advantage of the wars of the Horde with Lithuania, had redeemed himself from under their yoke for the consideration of a small annual tribute. The invasion of Edigee was very destructive; all the eastern districts were reduced to ashes; Vladimir, son of Andrew, the uncle of the Great Prince, and the illustrious companion-in-arms of Demetrius Donskoy, with difficulty held out in the Kremlin of Moscow. A few years later, the ancient city of Kieff and all the southern frontiers were exposed to the sword of the Tartars, and from those times declined still more in importance.

Photius found the patrimony of the metropolitical see partly spoiled by the enemy, and partly wasted by embezzlements of the boyars themselves during the vacancy, when there was no primate; and as he stood up warmly in defence of the property of the Church, he drew upon himself their enmity, in which the Great Prince himself joined. Photius, who had been used as a monk to the solitude of his cell, could ill bear the turmoils of public life in a strange country; he sought in vain for quiet in the favourite retreat of Cyprian, where like him he gave himself up to learning, and for a time retired into the forests in the district of Vladimir; but he was driven from thence also by a new invasion from the Horde, under the khan’s son, who laid waste the elder capital, Vladimir.

In the mean time another calamity, which had been long foreseen, assailed the Church of Russia from the West. Vitoft, though a zealot of Rome, yet, from his respect for Cyprian, had not attempted to break the unity of the metropolitical power; but Photius’ want of tact and experience in matters of state business, and the strictness with which he collected the revenues of the Church in the Lithuanian provinces, set the prince upon effecting a separation, which seemed convenient for his interests in a political point of view. He called together in Novogorod of Lithuania all his bishops; Theodosius of Polotsk, Isaak of Chernigoff, Dionysius of Loutsk, Gerasimus of Volhynia, John of Galich, Sebastian of Smolensk, Charito of Kholma, Paul of Cherven, Euphemius of Touroff; he represented to them the difficulties which must stand in the way of the Church being well governed, so long as it was dependant upon a foreign primate, and required that there should be a separate metropolitan for Kieff. The orthodox bishops hesitated for a long time to fulfil the wishes of a sovereign who professed another faith; but threats and other vexations at length wearied them out, and compelled them to proceed to an election. Gregory Simblak, a learned man of Bulgarian extraction, was sent by the synod to Constantinople for Consecration, with a complaint against the Metropolitan Photius, as if to turn off from the electors upon him the responsibility of violating the unity of the Church. But the Emperor Manuel and the Patriarch Callistus rejected the petition of the synod. The Metropolitan Photius himself, when he heard of the designs of the Lithuanians, resolved to go to Vitoft to prevent them, and even on from him to Constantinople, but he was robbed on the frontier-territory of Moscow, and compelled to return; while Vitoft drove his vicar out of Kieff, and made himself master of all that belonged to the metropolitan within the pale of his dominions.

The refusal of the patriarch of Constantinople to consecrate Simblak was no bar to the proud Lithuanian. He again convoked the bishops to Novogrodok, and compelled them to ordain Gregory as metropolitan of Kieff and all Russia. Being sensible, however, of the irregularity of their proceedings, the members of the synod sought to justify themselves by a circular letter, in which they accused of avarice not Photius only, but even the Greek emperors themselves, intimating that they made their own private advantage of sending metropolitans to Russia; at the same time they expressed their high respect for the œcumenical patriarchs, and their devotion to the doctrines of orthodoxy. On the other side, Photius called together the bishops of the Muscovite dominions, anathematized the acts of the synod of Novogrodok, and Simblak himself, and strove, with all his might, to re-establish the unity of the Church; but this he was never able to effect during the life of his rival, who had established his chair at Wilna.

Gregory, who was zealously attached to the doctrines of the Eastern Church, could not bear to see his sovereign professing another creed, and exhorted him to turn to orthodoxy. But Vitoft, while he declined entering himself into the controversy, made Gregory go to the West, where the synod of Constance was still sitting. Simblak remained unshaken in the traditions of his fathers, and soon after died at Wilna. On this the Metropolitan Photius, now become more experienced from his long residence in Russia, took advantage of the favourable conjuncture, and having undertaken the charge of conducting the Great Princess Sophia, on a visit to her father, succeeded in re-establishing a good understanding, which was no more interrupted till after both their deaths; for during the last days of Vitoft’s life, the metropolitan had yet once again after this, at Troki, a friendly interview with him, and with Yagello, king of Poland.

The death of Photius was very sensibly felt by the principality of Moscow, which was torn to pieces by the family feuds of its princes, after the prudent reign of Basil³¹, the son of Demetrius. His brother Yury rose up against his youthful son Basil, the legitimate Great Prince, whom the metropolitan, on the other hand, supported by his spiritual authority, and kept down the malcontents by the fear of excommunication. But when there was no longer any ecclesiastical head in Moscow, these dissensions broke out afresh, and were the very bitterest and fiercest of all that occur in our history. It seemed as if it had been decreed, that before Russia should begin to breathe again, after her two hundred years subjection to the Tartar yoke and her own civil dissensions, and rise to greatness in the person of John III., all those long-continued miseries should once more be accumulated together, and burst, for the last time, on the head of his father Basil. For what calamity is there which he did not experience during the six-and-thirty years of his reign? He was obliged to go to the Horde, and stand before Mahomet Khan to be judged with his ambitious uncle; he was taken prisoner by the same khan, after an engagement in which he was worsted, and was kept for some time in captivity; he was twice expelled from the throne of Great Prince by his own relations, was imprisoned by them, and at last had his eyes put out. But his country is indebted to this royal sufferer for his firmness in maintaining the orthodox Faith, for never at any other time was the Church of Russia exposed to so great a danger.

The successor of Vitoft, Svidrigailo, seeing that the primacy was vacant, despatched his favourite, Gerasimus, bishop of Smolensk, to Constantinople, where he was appointed metropolitan by the Patriarch Joseph. He did not succeed, however, in penetrating further than Smolensk; and was obliged to content himself with a residence there, which he preferred, in order that he might be nearer at hand to make his attempts upon Moscow, though neither that nor any other Russian diocese ever for a moment consented to acknowledge him; Novogorod alone unwillingly applied to him, after the death of their Archbishop Simeon, to consecrate to the chair of St. Sophia the holy Ephraim, one of the most virtuous of all the pastors of that city. After two years had elapsed, Gerasimus himself suffered death at the hand of his former benefactor. The ferocious Svidrigailo, having learned that he carried on a secret correspondence with Sigismund, his rival in the principality of Lithuania, to the horror of all the orthodox, burned the metropolitan alive at Vitebsk.

XXX. Isidore

In the mean time, the Great Prince Basil, taking it to heart that the Church should remain so long without a pastor, caused a synod to assemble, which, at his instigation, elected Jonah bishop of Riazan, a man who by his virtues shed a light on those stormy times of our country. He was sent for institution to the Patriarch Joseph; but Jonah found at Constantinople that another person had already been appointed metropolitan of all Russia, Isidore, a bishop of Illyria. This was at the very moment of the greatest distress of the Greek empire, which was now almost all shut up within the walls of the capital, and in daily horror of the gathering storm of the Ottomans. The Emperor John, seeing no means of deliverance within his empire, sought for aid from the Western Powers.

Eugenius IV., an experienced and politic old man, then occupied the papal throne; and although he himself was engaged in a contest with the synods of Constance and Basle, respecting the papal authority, he nevertheless proposed to the emperor to call a council in Italy for the reunion of the Churches, promising, if it were agreed to, to save Constantinople from the Turks. John, together with the Patriarch Joseph, and a venerable body of clergy, sailed for Venice; but as Russia already composed the larger half of the Eastern Church, Isidore, a friend of the pope, and a man of distinguished talents and eloquence, was chosen and sent to her as metropolitan. Kieff and Moscow gave him a public reception, and all Russia acknowledged him; but no more than four months had elapsed when he began to seek permission of the Great Prince to go to the council, representing to him that all the sovereigns and primates of both East and West were assembled to confer about the Faith, and that it was not meet that Russia alone should have no representative there. Basil gave a reluctant consent to the departure of the metropolitan, beseeching him to stand firm in defence of the doctrines of orthodoxy, and gave him Abram, bishop of Souzdal, to accompany him, together with a numerous suite. St. Euphemius, of Novogorod, conducted the primate to the frontiers of his diocese. The Grand Master³² of Livonia paid him the compliment of going out to meet him and giving him a public reception at Riga; from thence he sailed by sea to Lubeck, and proceeded to Ferrara, where the emperor and the pope were waiting only for his arrival in order to open the council.

Long controversies were begun respecting the procession of the Holy Spirit, purgatory, and unleavened bread, and above all respecting the power of the pope. The emperor and the patriarch, overwhelmed by the misfortunes of their country and by poverty, nevertheless stood out for a long time. The eloquent Mark, metropolitan of Ephesus, thundered against the new doctrines, and against the ambition of Rome; but Bessarion, metropolitan of Nice, and Isidore of Russia, inclined strongly to the interests of the pope. They transferred the council to Florence, where the Patriarch Joseph died. At length Eugenius obtained the upper hand, and declared beforehand the union of the Churches on conditions favourable to Rome. Mark of Ephesus was the only one who did not subscribe the acts of the council; he concealed himself, to become afterwards in the East the champion of orthodoxy; for the other œcumenical patriarchs rejected the union of Florence, and assembled together in Constantinople, and condemned all its conventions and acts³³. The emperor returned without obtaining any support for his falling empire; none of the western sovereigns gave him any assistance, or were even present at Florence; for they favoured rather the opinions of the council of Basle. Bessarion and Isidore were decorated with the Roman purple, while the last had the title given him of Cardinal Legate of the Apostolic See in Russia. He returned in triumph through Kieff to Moscow, bearing friendly letters from Pope Eugenius to the Great Prince; but the first time that he performed Divine service, when, in the cathedral of the Assumption, he was in the act of naming the Roman pontiff, together with the œcumenical patriarchs, and the archdeacon³⁴ had proclaimed from beside the chair of the primate the acts of the council of Florence, Basil indignantly rebuked Isidore, calling him a traitor to the cause of orthodoxy, and a false pastor. He summoned the bishops and the boyars to meet and pass their judgment on the new doctrine. Not one of them would consent to acknowledge the pope as the Vicar of Christ; and all of them, with one accord, rejected the western doctrine respecting the procession of the Holy Spirit that it is not only from the Father, but also from the Son, in contradiction to the ancient Creed³⁵, in spite of the subtle arguments of Isidore, whom they confined in the Choudoff monastery. He escaped, however, from his guards, and fled, and Basil prudently gave orders that he should not be pursued. Isidore was honourably received at Rome, and was sent to Constantinople, where great disturbances were excited among the people by the attempt to carry into effect the union of the Churches, even when the capital was on the very point of falling; for two patriarchs, Metrophanes and Gregory, one after the other adhered to the council of Florence. But when the last Constantine fell upon the ruins of his empire, on which the conqueror Mahomet established a new dynasty, Isidore again fled, and sought his safety at Rome, and was there honoured with the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. A disciple of his, Gregory, was consecrated metropolitan of Kieff, where about this time there commenced a succession of Latin bishops; but Gregory was not acknowledged in Russia, nor even in Lithuania, notwithstanding the protection of Casimir, sovereign of the latter country and of Poland. Thus terminated this attempt to subject Russia to the Roman see. A century and a half later its effects were felt in the grievous calamities inflicted on our country by the Pretenders, and the Unia.

XXXI. Saint Jonah

After the expulsion of Isidore, the Church of Russia was again for eight years in widowhood. During this period the Prince Demetrius Shemiaka, who, after having put out the eyes of Basil and cast him into prison, had taken possession of the throne, sent for Jonah, the bishop of Riazan, and offered him the dignity of metropolitan, if he would only reconcile him with the Great Prince. He cunningly persuaded the old man to bring to him to be educated the two children of the blind prince, whom the faithful boyars had concealed in Mourom, in his diocese, promising to pacify their unfortunate father by the gift of a rich patrimony, and threatening, on the other hand, to sack the town in case of a refusal. The hope of obtaining the dignity of primate could not influence Jonah, who was already regarded as the lawful successor to the metropolitical throne; but he hoped to alleviate the lot of Basil, for he did not anticipate the possibility of his reigning, and so he complied with the wishes of Shemiaka. He received on his omophorium³⁶, or pall, the young sons of the blinded prince in the cathedral at Mourom; but when Shemiaka, violating the oath which he had pledged, sent them to Ouglich to share their father’s confinement, the vehement remonstrances of the holy man wrought upon him to redeem his broken faith. “Thou hast disgraced my old age,” he said, “and now I am steeped in perjury: remove this sin from my soul and thine own: what dost thou fear from a blind prince and two little children?” This he urged without ceasing upon Shemiaka, until he touched his heart; and so he let Basil go free with his children to Vologda, having first taken the precaution to bind him with an oath taken upon the cross, and before a synod of bishops, instead of fetters. But the blind prince, who had been treacherously seized by his enemy within the walls of the Trinity Lavra, at the tomb of the wonder-worker Sergius, within the walls of another monastery received absolution from his compulsory oath. Tryphon, hegumen of the monastery of Bielo-ozero, took the oath upon himself and his fraternity, and urged the prince, for the good of his country, to reclaim for himself and his children their lawful inheritance. Moscow went forth with joy to meet her true sovereign, and his first act was to send the Bishop Jonah to Constantinople for institution.

Basil, in his letter to the emperor and patriarch, described the particulars of the confusion which had been introduced by the defection of the Metropolitan Isidore, and declared his own devotion to the ancient and orthodox doctrine. But reports concerning the relations which Constantinople then had with Rome, caused the Great Prince to delay his embassy. Waiting more favourable circumstances, St. Jonah governed the Church for five years without being synodically appointed. But at length, seeing that the disorders in the East still continued, Basil convoked the Russian bishops, Ephraim of Rostoff, Abram of Souzdal, who had fled from the council of Florence, Barlaam of Columna, and Pitirim of Perm, who was afterwards martyred by the savage inhabitants of his diocese for the Name of Christ; these instituted Jonah as metropolitan of all Russia, while St. Euphemius of Novogorod and the bishop of Tver sent him the letters of confirmation³⁷.

From this time, on account of the fall of the Greek empire, all our metropolitans were appointed by a council of their own bishops; for they had no means of passing through Lithuania to Constantinople, which was then oppressed by the Ottoman yoke. But the spiritual bond of union with the Eastern Church, and even the subordination of the Russian primate to the throne of Constantinople, were preserved inviolate; on all possible opportunities the patriarchs communicated with the metropolitans of Russia either by letters or by bishops going in person from one to the other: and the other œcumenical patriarchs, yielding to the pressure of the circumstances of those times, recognised this mode of consecration, and did not break off unity with us on this account, as appears from the Book of the Kormchay³⁸ or Nomocanon. St. Jonah however was the last who bore the title of Metropolitan of Kieff: his successors took that of Metropolitan of Moscow and of all Russia: for Kieff from this time began to have a regular succession of metropolitans of its own, subject to Lithuania. He continued for seven years to shew forth an example of all the virtues of a good pastor, on the episcopal throne; he consoled the capital under its suffering from conflagrations and from a dreadful invasion of the Tartars, who all but got possession of the Kremlin; and even during his life he was glorified from above by the gifts of prophecy and healing; having, like St. Peter, foretold the deliverance of Russia from the yoke of the infidels, and its future glory.

The episcopate of the Metropolitan Jonah terminated nearly at the same time with the reign of Basil. A good Providence prolonged the holy life of that great Churchman to the glorious times of John III., who shed new splendour upon Russia. And here we may well fix our eyes with astonishment on those ages of slavery which have gone by, and offer a heartfelt thanksgiving to the Lord, who under the shadow of his Church preserved the rising empire during its youth, entrusting its helm, amid civil wars and barbarous captivity, during the course of two hundred years, to a glorious succession of great prelates. Scarcely had the Tartars appeared and laid waste our country, when one after another there rose up, sometimes from her own bosom, at others from Greece, Cyrill, and Maximus, the Saints Peter and Theognostes, Alexis, Cyprian, Photius, and lastly Jonah, all of whom the Church reckons in the company of her guardians and intercessors; having learned to trust by experience, even during their lives, in that heavenly aid which they afforded her after their blessed deaths. The period of the rule of each of these was so prolonged, their force of character, their devotion to the Church, so unshaken, and so touching was the sanctity of their lives, that internal storms by little and little subsided into calm at the word of the prelates, and, as in some sheltered haven, the feuds of the princes were quieted around them, while the waves without were often broken against the solid opposition of the hierarchical order. Certainly Russia is bound to remember with devout gratitude all these her holy defenders during the stormy days, of her youth; especially, and above all, Cyrill, Peter, Alexis, Cyprian, and Jonah.

From the accession of John III., there was a great change both in the external and internal circumstances of Russia which in the course of his long and prudent reign ripened into a powerful empire. The Golden Horde, which had once been so formidable, had now fallen into pieces of itself; its last khan, Achmet, with difficulty exacted a nominal tribute from the Great Prince. Three separate kingdoms were formed from its ruins; that of Kazan, which was more hostile than the others to Moscow, although its kings were often appointed by our sovereigns, as ours had once been by the khans; that of Astrachan, in the distant South, composed of many wandering hordes; and lastly, that of the Crimæa, the founder of which, Mengly Hirey, was during his whole life the firm ally of John. He crushed the tribe of Achmet, and harassed Lithuania with his incursions. On the other hand, the great Lithuanian principality, which already embraced all the south and west districts of Russia, became still more powerful when its sovereigns of the race of Hedimine ascended the throne of Poland. It shut out the West from us, although the embassies of John visited the courts of all the sovereigns of Europe, from the pope and the Roman emperor even down to the sultan. The warlike order of the knights of Livonia, acting in concert with Lithuania, threatened the frontiers of Novogorod and Pskoff, which John, to the extreme displeasure of the popular assembly, had begun to call his patrimony. The civil feuds which had distracted the empire within itself, were now extinguished; Riazan alone claimed the rights of a separate but inoffensive principality, under the influence of that of Moscow; Tver had already come as it were into the family of Moscow by the matrimonial alliance which John contracted with the daughter of its prince, and he took it into his own hands altogether upon the flight of the last reigning prince, who had been discovered to entertain secret relations with Lithuania. The concentration of the empire under one head was the object which John steadily pursued throughout his whole life.

His influence was great also in Church affairs; for the Russian Church, properly so called, was now all comprised within the limits of his empire, in consequence of the separation of the southern dioceses from the jurisdiction of the metropolitans of Moscow. With St. Jonah terminated the line of those great prelates who had extended their beneficent influence over the ancient patrimony of our Church, and had joined all together in one by their frequent journeys in different directions throughout Russia, and to Constantinople, from whence they brought the most enlightened principles and models of ecclesiastical administration. Our involuntary separation from Constantinople, after its fall, was sensibly felt in its consequences, when men of exalted acquirements, such as Cyprian and Photius, no longer came to us to fill the throne of Moscow. Inaccuracies crept by little and little into our Slavonic books of Divine service, and into some of the ceremonies, from their no longer being compared with the Greek, which, though inconsiderable in themselves, nevertheless took deep root, and served eventually for the occasion of lamentable divisions.

XXXII. Theodosius

Theodosius, the successor of St. Jonah, was appointed by a Russian synod in the last year of Basil the Blind, from having been archbishop of Rostoff, in consequence of the seniority of his see³⁹; but he did not sit as metropolitan of Moscow more than five years. The opinion then greatly prevalent of the end of the world being at hand, at the expiration of the seven thousandth year from the creation, moved the zeal of the boyars to erect numbers of private churches; while the multiplication of priests, who had no parochial cure, and the demand for whom made it difficult to observe proper strictness in their selection, produced a relaxation in the morals of the clergy. Theodosius, who was a strict disciplinarian, excited great dissatisfaction against himself by his corrective measures, and only avoided a public disturbance by voluntarily retiring into the Choudoff monastery. There he took to himself into his cell, a poor and feeble old man, and tended him as a servant till his death, washing his sores, as a pattern of Christian humility. A year before his retirement it was his fortune to take part in the affairs of the Church of Palestine. Joseph, patriarch of Jerusalem, flying from the persecutions of the sultan of Egypt, resolved to seek refuge in Russia, but died on his road, at Kaffa⁴⁰. His brother arrived at Moscow, with letters commendatory, and was ordained by a synod of Russian bishops to be metropolitan of Cæsarea. This was the first appeal of the Eastern Church in her affliction, after the taking of Constantinople, to the charity and affection of the Russians, her brethren by unity of faith.

XXXIII. Philip I

Philip, bishop of Souzdal, was appointed metropolitan, and inherited the virtues as well as the dignity of Theodosius; during the seven years that he governed the Church, he shewed a remarkable firmness of character. The name of John, which was already known in Europe, attracted the attention of the Roman pontiff, Paul, at whose court the family of Thomas, lord of the Morea, and brother of the last Constantine, had found an asylum. Just before the fall of Constantinople, there had been a renewal of the connection which had previously existed between the family of the Great Prince and that of the emperors, when Anna, sister to Basil the Blind, was given in marriage to John Paleologus; and after its fall, the pope could not find any more suitable match for Sophia, the heiress of the Greek emperors, than the powerful sovereign of Russia. The idea of a general crusade against the Turks, together with the hope of uniting our country with Rome through the instrumentality of Sophia, who had been bred up in the doctrines of the Council of Florence, induced Paul to deliver over to Russia this last relic of the ancient glories of Byzantium; and John gladly received this her last pledge in the person of Sophia⁴¹. But the hopes of Rome were disappointed; the princess had no sooner crossed the frontier, and come within our territory, than she shewed herself a zealous follower of the Orthodox Confession; and when Anthony, the papal legate, who accompanied her, wished to make his public entry into Moscow with the cross borne before him after the Latin fashion, and John hesitated from respect to his quality of ambassador, the Metropolitan Philip stood up in defence of the supremacy of the Church of his country. “Whoever” said he to John, “praises and honours a foreign faith, that man degrades his own. If the legate enters with his cross at one gate of the city, I shall go out of it by the other.” After the celebration of the marriage the metropolitan had some discussions with the legate about the Faith, but the cautious envoy of Rome avoided entering into any decisive controversy, and excused himself on the ground of not having his books with him.

Philip, zealous for the honour of the cathedral of the Assumption, where his blessed predecessors reposed, and assisted by the contributions of the boyars and the clergy, began to erect a new church on the site of the old building of Kalita; but from the unskilfulness of the builders the arches soon fell in, and this caused the Great Prince to send for Aristotle⁴², a celebrated architect, from Italy. He erected the cathedral of the Assumption in that magnificent Byzantine style, for which it is still admired, as the brightest jewel of the ancient Kremlin; and two other magnificent cathedrals, those of the Annunciation and of the Archangel, were rebuilt under his superintendence upon their former sites. In the inside of the temple of the Assumption, there were laid as foundation-stones at the four corners the bodies of those great prelates, who had reposed in the former sanctuary; Peter and Theognostes within the side-altar⁴³, Cyprian and Photius in the south-western corner of the church; and in the opposite corner, over against them, Jonah, whose body was found uncorrupted while the building was in progress. But the Primate Philip saw neither the fall of the church which he had commenced, nor the erection of the new one; he was seized with a sudden fright on occasion of a dreadful conflagration in the Kremlin, and fell sick soon after, and died; he had much emaciated his body with fasting, and there were found upon it after death heavy irons, which were hung up over his tomb.

XXXIV. Gerontius

Gerontius, bishop of Columna, having been elected to succeed him as metropolitan, completed and consecrated the cathedral of the Assumption which Philip had begun. For more than twenty years he fed the Church of Christ, during the most glorious period of the reign of John; for he witnessed the reduction of the independency of Novogorod, and the throwing off the Tartar yoke; and on both these important occasions our attention is drawn to distinguished members of the clergy. On the first of them to Theophilus, who was the last bishop elected by the people to the throne of St. Sophia after the blessed decease of St. Jonah, a man memorable for the virtues which adorned his long episcopate. The Assembly would not allow their new pastor to go to Moscow for Institution, because John in his letter, which invited him thither, had called Novogorod his patrimony, but wished to send him for Consecration into Lithuania, which was in their alliance, to the metropolitan of Kieff. But Theophilus, who was a zealous observer of the traditions of his fathers, refused to violate the ancient order of the hierarchy. During John’s first expedition against them, he reconciled his flock to him, and received canonical Consecration in Moscow; and when for the second time the independent spirit of this trading republic, excited by Martha their mayoress, rose in contention against the authority of the powerful John, and his army had routed the bands of Novogorod, Theophilus, under the very walls of the city, obtained by his prayers the mercy of the conqueror for the inhabitants, although with the loss of all their popular privileges, and of his own riches, which were taken away by the Great Prince. The Lord himself shortly after suffered for the last outbreak of the democratic spirit of his fellow-citizens, who wished to give themselves up to Lithuania, and terminated a life of trouble in confinement in the Choudoff monastery, having been throughout the victim of popular commotions.

The fall of Novogorod had been long before foretold by the Archbishop St. Euphemius, at the very time of the birth of its terrible conqueror; and this prophecy had been repeated to the ambitious Martha by the lips of Zosimus, the holy hegumen of the Solovetsky monastery, who was haughtily received in her palace, when he had come during the days of the glory of Novogorod, to solicit alms for his poor monastery on the ocean. Though John had confined Theophilus, he still did not think of appointing a new Lord without a synodical election. Agreeably with what had been the custom at Novogorod, three names were placed on the altar⁴⁴ of the cathedral of the Assumption, and the lot fell on Sergius, a humble monk of the Trinity Lavra, who was consecrated by a synod of bishops. Sergius, however, before long retired in consequence of the dislike which the people manifested against having a stranger for their Lord, and their opposition to his new regulations of Church discipline. He ceded his place to the more experienced and enlightened Gennadius, archimandrite of the Choudoff monastery, who afterwards rendered signal services to the Church by his refutations of heresy.

The long wished-for time had at length arrived for the deliverance of our country from the ignominious yoke which had so heavily oppressed her for two centuries and a half. Already had Sophia, the prudent consort of the Great Prince, who from having been educated amid the greatness of royalty wished to surround the court of John with the same, obtained the removal of the representatives of the Horde from the interior of the Kremlin, where on the site of their residence she built a church by the name of St. Nicolas of Hostoun⁴⁵; already the envoys of the khan had ceased to be received with honour; the tribute itself was withheld, although the alliance of Lithuania with the Horde might have inspired John with fear. At length Achmet put himself in motion; for the last time the Golden Horde armed itself against Russia, and brought to mind the hosts of Mamai. The Great Prince marched out with his army to the banks of the Oka, which is called among the common people The Girdle of the Mother of God, from the fact of Russia having more than once been saved on its banks. There his resolution faltered. His cautious policy dreaded to trust the future destinies of the whole empire to the fortune of a single battle, as the bold hero of the Don had done; and having left his son with the army, he himself retired to his capital, to the general dissatisfaction of the people. The idea that the Tartars were invincible had long since died away; Kasan, a large fragment of the kingdom of Kaptchak, had taught us the way to victory over the infidels. The murmurs of the people against John increased more and more: at this juncture the eloquent and aged Bassian, archbishop of Rostoff, who had imbibed at the tomb of the venerable Sergius, when hegumen of his monastery, the inheritance of his patriotism, by his bold speech and letter of exhortation aroused the spirit of John:—“Dost thou dread death?” he wrote; “Thou too must die as well as others: death is the lot of all, man, beast, and bird alike: none can avoid it. Give these warriors into my hand, and old as I am, I will not spare myself, nor will ever turn my back to the Tartars.” The Metropolitan Gerontius added his exhortations to the words of Bassian, and the Great Prince returned to the camp. Achmet fled without fighting, and Russia was set free for ever.

During the last years of the primacy of Gerontius, mutual misunderstandings arose between him and John, and the metropolitan in bitterness resolved to retire into the Simonoff monastery, that he might there end his days in peace. John offered his place to Paisius the hegumen of the Trinity; but the monk, who well knew already how heavy a burden he undertakes who is set to govern, had no desire for that exalted station, and Gerontius, at the entreaty of the Great Prince, remained on his throne till his decease.

Quite at the commencement of his primacy there had come another claimant to be metropolitan of all Russia, a man named Spiridion, a native of Tver, who had made interest and procured himself to be appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople; he was not acknowledged either in Lithuania or in Moscow, but was placed under confinement at Bielo-ozero. In the mean time Kieff continued to have her own succession of orthodox metropolitans, apart from Moscow, who either received their appointment personally in Constantinople, or through letters of benediction and approval, and patriarchal exarchs or nuncios, who from time to time visited our southern provinces. Misael, a man of princely blood, was the first separate metropolitan of Kieff, after the Uniate Gregory; Simeon, in whose time Mengly Hirey, khan of the Crimæa, sacked the ancient capital, and pillaged the Pecherskay Lavra, and the church of St. Sophia; Jonah, who enjoyed the favour of Casimir, sovereign of Lithuania; and Saint Macarius, martyred on the road by the Tartars, whose uncorrupted remains repose in the cathedral of St. Sophia, ruled each in his turn for a short space their extensive diocese, having their residence in Wilna, where they with difficulty maintained themselves against the influence of Rome.

XXXV. Zosimus

After the death of Gerontius, Zosimus, archimandrite of the Simonoff monastery, was consecrated in Moscow as metropolitan without the consent of a synod; but on this occasion the selection of the Great Prince was unfortunate, for under the mask of piety was concealed in the new primate a wicked heretic. For about twenty years before this, there had been secretly spreading in Novogorod a blasphemous Jewish heresy, which rejected our Saviour Jesus Christ and all his doctrine. It was brought from Lithuania by a Jew named Zachariah, and was mixed up with the former errors of the Strigolniks⁴⁶. By the secret of his sorceries and cabalistic art, this Zachariah seduced two superstitious priests of Novogorod, Alexis and Dionysius, and through their means his destructive doctrines took root among the ignorant people, for they hypocritically kept up all the external observances of Christianity, although they themselves made no sort of account of them. The fame of the wisdom and virtues of these two priests deceived even the Great Prince himself, the first time that he went against Novogorod. He took them with him to Moscow, and gave to one of them the place of archpriest or dean of the cathedral of the Assumption, and to the other the same place in the cathedral of the Archangel. With them the heresy first penetrated into our orthodox capital, and although its pernicious fruits were some time before they appeared openly, nevertheless the private secretary⁴⁷ of the Tsar, whose name was Couritsin, and the Archimandrite Zosimus, were secret disciples of Alexis, and by his means the last of the two attained the rank of metropolitan.

Gennadius, the zealous Lord of Novogorod, was horror-struck on discovering this Jewish heresy amongst his flock, and was the first who gave notice of it to the metropolitan, who was then still Gerontius. But the old man, worn out with years and vexations, did not give the matter that attention which it required, but supposed that it was of no great consequence. A second and more earnest representation with stronger proofs, compelled John and Zosimus to convoke a synod of bishops; at this synod there appeared another eloquent accuser of the Judaisers and Strigolniks in the person of St. Joseph hegumen of Volokolamsk, who was the most enlightened and learned man of his times, and a pupil of St. Paphnutius, the illustrious founder of the monastery of Boroff. The heart of Joseph burned with a flaming zeal for the Church, his lips were powerfully eloquent, and his convincing letters, while they were the scourge of heresy, triumphantly defended the pure and orthodox Faith. He was personally as much dreaded by the heretics in Moscow, as Gennadius was in Novogorod. But the protection of Zosimus, who himself shared their opinions, screened certain of the offenders in the synod. The principal heresiarch, Alexis, was already dead. Dionysius and his other followers were delivered over by the council to an anathema, and were thrown into confinement. It was not however till twelve years after that all the traces of their corrupt doctrine were eradicated in Moscow by the renewed efforts and instructions of Gennadius and Joseph; the metropolitan himself having been by that time compelled by the Great Prince to retire into the shade of his former monastery, nominally on account of habits of intemperance, that scandal might not be caused by publishing among the people his real and capital fault of heresy. After that, John delivered up his secretary, the archimandrite of the Jurieff, and others, whose guilt had been proved, and whom the first measures taken by the mildness of the Church had failed to turn into the way of repentance.

XXXVI. Simon

After the primacy of the Metropolitan Zosimus, so unfortunate for the Church, John, having now had much experience in spiritual affairs, selected a worthy pastor in the person of his successor Simon, who had been before his consecration hegumen of the Trinity Lavra. Perhaps the unhappy result of his departure from canonical custom in the election of Zosimus, influenced the Great Prince this time to clothe the consecration of the new primate with extraordinary solemnity. Having delivered over the primate elect into the hands of the bishops at the doors of the church, he himself received him with a complimentary speech after the Mystery of Ordination had been completed upon him, after the example of the Byzantine emperors, whom he sought to imitate on all occasions of display by a splendid ceremonial both in his court and in the Church. The metropolitan in his turn, holding his Staff in his hand, replied to him with a speech from his throne.

Before the heretical disturbances above mentioned were yet over, another superstitious agitation of men’s minds concerning the speedy end of the world had caused the assembling of a council, which decreed that the beginning of the new year should be kept on the first of September instead of the first of March; and settled the Paschal Tables in the calendar for an eighth thousand of years, as calculated by the Archbishop Gennadius; for the former Table terminated in the year 1492, that is, with the completion of seven thousand years from the creation of the world. Soon after the appointment of Simon to be metropolitan, John manifested an intention of taking away the Church lands and hereditaments from the monasteries of the government of Moscow, as well as in Novogorod, where he had granted away part of them to the Sons of the boyars⁴⁸ for military service, and taken part to himself. But the metropolitan laid before the Great Prince the testamentary letters of St. Vladimir, Yaroslaff, and other sovereigns, as well as the edicts of the khans of the Horde, and John was prevailed upon to lay aside his intention. In another synod strict measures were taken by him, in concert with the metropolitan, for the preservation of purity of morals amongst the clergy; and for this end the monasteries for men were separated from those designed for women, and monks were prohibited from performing Divine service in these latter; and further, to cut off all possible occasion of scandal, widower ministers were forbidden to consecrate the sacred mysteries, and it was enjoined that all unworthy clerks should be degraded from their orders. Nor did they pass over without notice the payments demanded for conferring sacred orders, which had been so frequent a cause of dissatisfaction in Novogorod, and for which at length, though on a false accusation, the Lord Gennadius himself suffered. He was deprived of the throne of St. Sophia, and afterwards ended his days in the same Choudoff monastery from whence he had been taken to be archbishop.

About this time, and acting in the same pious spirit, Joseph Salkan, metropolitan of Kieff and successor of St. Macarius, convoked in Wilna a council of all his suffragan bishops, for the regulation of ecclesiastical discipline, and for the protection of the patrimony of the Church against the encroachments of the Lithuanian nobles, who were of the Roman faith. But notwithstanding his zeal for the benefit of his flock, Joseph fell under a suspicion of heterodoxy with our ambassadors, and was even accused by them before their sovereign of conniving at the conduct of his son-in-law, Alexander of Lithuania, who would not permit his consort Helena, a daughter of John, to have her own private chapel in the palace, which most sensibly afflicted the heart of her father. In vain did the meek and virtuous Helena, while she followed with constancy her own religion, endeavour to conceal the persecution she suffered from her husband, so as not to produce a quarrel between him and her father; for it had been the first article of her marriage-contract that she should enjoy the free exercise of her religion: Alexander from his blind devotion to Rome, made it but too manifest that he spared neither his subjects nor his wife, and a cruel war was the consequence of his persecution of orthodoxy. The arms of the Russians, which had been taken up in support of the religion of their fathers, were crowned with success, in spite of all the efforts of Lithuania, the Order of the Sword-bearers, and even Poland itself, the throne of which Alexander had ascended. The pope and the emperor laboured to bring about a peace, but the province of Sever on this side the Dnieper remained with us as a proof of the victories of John. Its princes willingly submitted to a sovereign of their own faith, and the Russian hierarchy gained two more dioceses, Chernigoff and Bransk; the last, however, was soon suppressed.

With the fall of the Golden Horde of Achmet another ancient diocese also became extinct, namely, that of Sarai and Podonsk, because our bishops ceased to reside in Sarai, the capital of the khans: they transferred their seat to Moscow, and acted in the quality of vicars to the metropolitan within the sphere of his own proper jurisdiction: their residence on the steep banks of the Moskva procured them the appellation of Bishops of the Steeps⁴⁹.

Besides the painful situation of his beloved daughter in a foreign country, domestic afflictions in his own capital, and within the walls of his own palace, clouded the latter years of the glorious reign of John. His eldest son, the hope of the country, who had already shared with him the weight of the government, died in the prime of youth, leaving him a grandson named Demetrius, born of Helena, daughter of the great Stephen, Hospodar of Moldavia. A secret enmity sprung up between the two mothers Helena and the Great Princess Sophia, on account of the succession to the throne, which the latter wished to obtain for John’s second son by herself, Basil. Provoked by their intrigues the monarch took the part of his young grandson, who had the right of primogeniture on his side, and determined to raise him solemnly to the throne. The Metropolitan Simon performed on him the ceremony of coronation, for the first time since the reign of Monomachus. His crown and the holy Barma were placed on the innocent youth, but only to his hurt; for Sophia by her artfulness soon prevailed over the will of John, and Basil, even during the life of his father, was declared sovereign of all Russia, while Demetrius and his unfortunate mother ended their days in confinement.

The reign of Basil was only a continuation of that of John, whose plans he followed for the union and consolidation of his dominions under one head, though with more mildness in his measures. Under him the separate principality of Riazan, and the independent city of Pskoff, were insensibly absorbed into the government of Moscow, and in the same way the provinces of Sever, the appanage of the family of Shemiakin, disappeared, so that there was now no longer left any division of government within Russia. Without, a struggle was going on almost without interruption; in the East with Kazan, which was still unsubdued, and ever in a distracted state, to which Basil in vain sent kings of their own tribe; in the South with the Horde of the Crimæa, from whence Machmet, son of Mengly Hirey, the determined enemy of Basil, forgetful of his father’s league with Russia, laid waste her borders, and once even advanced upon Moscow; on the West with Sigismund king of Poland and Lithuania. But this last war was more successful than the rest in its results, and confirmed to us the conquests of John. Smolensk itself, our ancient heritage, surrendered to the Great Prince, although the bishop, Barsonophius, leaned to the side of Lithuania. He was confined in the Choudoff monastery, and upon the appointment of a new bishop named Joseph, their ancient diocese was united to the hierarchy of Moscow. The Novodayvichy monastery was built in the capital as a memorial of this joyful event. Basil also kept up friendly relations with the sovereigns of Europe, with the emperor and the pope, and in the Order of the Knights of Livonia, which had always before been hostile to Russia, he had a faithful ally against the designs of Sigismund.

Extraordinary piety was the distinguishing feature of Basil’s character; he was full of reverence for all the ordinances of the holy Church, which enjoyed peace during the thirty years of his reign, and was glorified by producing illustrious saints, men beloved by God, in the same manner as she had done in the times of John. Novogorod and Pskoff during the last years of their greatness were adorned with new monasteries, the founders of which were two men of the same name of Sabba, Ephraim, and Nicander, and the two Lords, St. Euphemius, and St. Jonah; while on the border Livonia a cavern monastery, called from thence Pechersky, was dug out by the clergy who fled from the persecutions at Dorpat. But, above all, the savage North was covered with a flourishing growth of monasteries, as if it were inspired with life by the solitary exercises of the hermits who went forth from the communities of Balaam and Bielo-ozero, and sought for retirement in the forests of the new diocese of Vologda, which had been instituted in the room of Perm. It was already long since that St. Dionysius of Gloushit, and his disciple Gregory, and Paul of Komel, had established themselves there; they were followed and emulated by Cornelius, and Theodosius of Totem, and Anthony of Sie, and still later, in the time of John the Terrible, by the three Alexanders of Komel, Sveer, and Oskeven, with many others whose names and actions cannot find room in such a rapid sketch as this. The celebrated hermits, Nilus of Sor, the writer of the Monastic Rule, Cyrill of Novo-ozero, and Nilus of Stolben, who wrought out his salvation in the district of Tver, where a little earlier the memory of Macarius of Koliazin had come to be celebrated, were also contemporaries of Basil; while the great Daniel, the hegumen of Pereyaslavla, was not only his contemporary, but his personal friend and instructor.

However, in the absence of heresies⁵⁰ other dark clouds came over the horizon of the Church; a misunderstanding broke out between Serapion Lord of Novogorod and Joseph hegumen of Volokolamsk, who had found in him no defence against the cruel oppressions of the prince of his district. The Metropolitan Simon, with the consent of the Great Prince, took the new monastery under his own protection, exempting it from the diocese of Novogorod, and transferring it to his own; on which Serapion laid an interdict on the hegumen and on all the community, and expressed himself in bitter terms of the person of the metropolitan. By the judgment of a synod he was deprived of his throne, and afterwards ended his days in a blessed manner, in the act of prayer, in the monastery of the Trinity, to which he had formerly belonged, after having been reconciled to the primate, and even to the hegumen Joseph himself.

The removal of St. Serapion was a very sensible loss to Novogorod, which remained for seventeen years without a Lord, till the consecration of Macarius. This prelate, who was destined to be metropolitan of all Russia, shewed beforehand on the throne of St. Sophia what the Church and his country might expect from him. He re-animated the clergy and the people, who were depressed by having been so long without a head. All the monasteries, both of men and women, received from him a Rule for their conventual life⁵¹. During his episcopate the ancient temple of St. Sophia was renovated and adorned, and his pastoral cares penetrated even to the remotest parts of the North; the monk Elias, who was sent thither by him to preach the word of God, converted the savage natives to Christianity, and with the blessing of Macarius built the first church by the name of St. John the Baptist, at the request of the Lopars themselves.

XXXVII. Barlaam

We must reckon as another unhappy event for our Church, after the disagreement of the two holy men Joseph and Serapion, the unjust persecution of the pious monk Maximus, of the Holy Mountain. There began to be a great number of monks coming in quest of alms from Athos and Sinai to their brethren in Russia, during the times of the Great Prince Basil and the meek Barlaam, who had been consecrated metropolitan, after the death of Simon. The Choudoff monastery, which had already become illustrious by the discovery of the relics of the Metropolitan Alexis, served as a house of reception for the stranger pilgrims; and perhaps such interchange of charity suggested to Basil the idea of requesting the patriarch of Constantinople to send him a learned Greek to examine and arrange the rich collection of Greek MSS. which had been brought together in his palace, and had come to him from his ancestors and his mother Sophia. Maximus, a monk, who had received the best education in Italy, came from Mount Athos to gratify the wish of the sovereign; and having been welcomed by him in a flattering manner, set to work not only to arrange the library of MSS., but also to translate a Commentary on the Psalter, and to correct some of the Church books, into which there had crept gross errors from the ignorance of transcribers. But when the Metropolitan Barlaam, to escape from the noise of the world, had retired into his former monastery, the Simonoff, and the ambitious Daniel, hegumen of Volokolamsk, had succeeded to his chair, the useful labours of the Greek stranger were condemned, and he himself became the cause of a popular disturbance.

XXXVIII. Daniel

A pupil of the enlightened Joseph, whose followers were noted for their extraordinary zeal, and were even distinguished from other monks by the title of Josephians, Daniel could not endure to see corrections made in their books by the learned foreigner, who besides had free access to the Great Prince, and no small influence at court. Maximus, as if from a presentiment of his fate, requested in good time his own dismissal; but he was detained, and heard from one of those most about him the bitter truth, that he had seen too much in Russia to be allowed to return. An incident which no one could have foreseen decided his lot: Basil, seeing himself childless after having been married twenty years, determined to put away his wife Salmone, with whom he had otherwise no fault to find, for her barrenness, and requested a dispensation, to enable him to do so, from the metropolitan. Daniel, wishing to please the Great Prince for his own political ends, consented, contrary to the canons of the Church, to dissolve the holy bond of matrimony, provided only that the Great Princess would retire into a monastery. Her doing so was made compulsory, and Salmone died a nun in Souzdal, while Basil contracted another marriage with Helena, daughter of the Prince Glinsky. Many secretly condemned him for this; but two monks, Bassian, a man of princely blood, who had been compelled by John to receive the tonsure in the Simonoff monastery for his devotion to the youthful Demetrius, and Maximus, the Greek, were not afraid to declare openly that the whole proceeding was unlawful. They were both imprisoned; the first in the monastery of Volokolamsk, the second in the Otroch⁵² monastery at Tver, where he was closely confined during all the time of the primacy of Daniel, being never so much as suffered to go out of his cell. His imprisonment was at length made more tolerable by his being removed to the Trinity Lavra; but notwithstanding his own touching letters, and the intervention of the œcumenical patriarchs in his behalf, the pining sufferer was never again allowed to return to that country which he longed after, nor to the Holy Mountain.

John, the Terrible, was the fruit of this forbidden marriage. His father, in delight at his birth, confided him to the prayers of St. Sergius, on whose tomb he placed the royal infant⁵³. He was christened by Joasaph, the hegumen of the monastery, who was destined to suffer afterwards as metropolitan in the turbulent days of John’s minority; three monks, among whom was St. Daniel of Pereyaslavla, received him from the font. Four years afterwards, Basil was taken off by a premature death, which was affecting from the piety of the dying man. The Great Prince, having disposed of the affairs of his government and family, asked for the monastic habit: his boyars, on the contrary, represented to him the example of his great father and of his ancestors, who departed this life without relinquishing their royal dignity; but Basil persisted in demanding the tonsure. Then the metropolitan replied with anger to the boyars: “No one shall take his soul away from me; a vessel of silver is good, but one of gold is better.” And so he gave the tonsure to the Great Prince Basil by the name of Barlaam, after the founder of his favourite monastery of Bielo-ozero. They took the mantle from the bursar of the Trinity monastery for the royal monk, and the whole of the two communities, of The Trinity, and of Volokolamsk, bore his corpse out of the palace in procession, amidst the lamentations of the people, into the cathedral of the Archangel, which he had not long before repaired and beautified, and which was the burying-place of his royal ancestors⁵⁴.

The metropolitan hastened to administer to his tumultuous boyars and to the people the oath of allegiance to the infant prince and his mother; but he was unable even to maintain himself long in his place. With the premature death of the regent mother his primacy terminated. The Council of the Boyars which governed the kingdom during the minority of John, threw every thing into confusion by their party-quarrels and seditions, and Daniel was the first to suffer. The powerful Princes Shouesky compelled him to sign his own abdication, and dismissed him to his former monastery of Volokolamsk, where by the rigour of his life he atoned for the errors which he had committed in his ecclesiastical government.

XXXIX. Joasaph

The new metropolitan, Joasaph, was promoted by them only to follow his predecessor in misfortune. Through his intercession, the Princes Belsky, who were nearly related to the youthful sovereign, and his cousin-german Vladimir were released from confinement. But the beneficent influence of the meek pastor lasted only till the fall of the Belskys. The same Princes Shouesky, after having loaded him with insults in the presence of the youthful Tsar, deposed him from his chair, and, scarcely letting him go with his life, banished him to Bielo-ozero, from whence he was removed to the Lavra. There the tomb of this holy prelate may still be seen, close to that of Serapion, Lord of Novogorod; both were deprived of their thrones, and both were accounted blessed after death. In the mean time, during ten years of continued turbulence and faction on the part of the boyars, the youth John was growing up to manhood, abandoned to the free indulgence of all his passions, through the connivance and example of his criminal guardians. His disposition, naturally harsh, became still more fierce and cruel as he grew up, and discovered a tendency to those horrors, which were to darken his old age. But for the happiness of Russia, the intervening years of his manhood were unexpectedly adorned by royal virtues, under the salutary influence of the Priest Silvester, and of Adasheff, in the days of the Metropolitan Macarius.

XL. Macarius

Called from Novogorod by the Council of the Boyars⁵⁵, which had deposed his two predecessors, Macarius brought with him to the metropolitical throne that experience and tact, which enabled him to maintain his ground in the midst of contending parties, and he was a good counsellor to the youthful Tsar. The Shoueskys had already fallen; but the Glinskys, the uncles of the sovereign, had stepped into their place, to the disgrace of their country, which was harassed by foreign enemies, while torn by its own civil dissensions. But all this was unexpectedly changed. John, by the advice of the metropolitan, announced his intention of being crowned to his kingdom after the example of Monomachus, and of entering into a matrimonial alliance. Moscow was filled with joy. In the cathedral of the Assumption, Macarius with great pomp invested him with the holy Barma⁵⁶, the chain, the crown, and the cross of the great Monomachus, according to the order for the coronation of the Greek emperors. The Patriarch Joasaph of Constantinople by a benedictory letter confirmed John in his kingdom⁵⁷, as being the last scion of the ancient imperial house. Thirty-six metropolitans, archbishops, and bishops of the Eastern Church, subscribed this precious letter, which is still preserved in the archives of Moscow, and for which, according to the account of Kourbsky, Theodoret, a monk of the Solovetsky monastery, had been sent by John to Constantinople. Soon after this another coronation⁵⁸ in the wedding of the youthful Tsar with the virtuous Anastasia, of the house of the Romanoffs, flattered Russia with new hopes of happiness. The undertaking of pilgrimages on the part of the royal couple to the Lavra of St. Sergius, the favourite place of John’s devotions, to Bielo-ozero, Piesnosh, Volokolamsk, and other monasteries, put the finishing seal upon this event, so joyful both to the family and to the empire.

An unexpected calamity completely turned the Tsar from the ruinous courses of his youth. A dreadful conflagration consumed great part of the capital, and over its ashes there broke out an insurrection of the people; one of the Glinskys was murdered by the populace in the cathedral; on the Sparrow hills, to which he had retired, John himself trembled in dismay. At that moment, as it had been some accusing angel, a very aged man, named Silvester, a priest of Novogorod, stood at his side, and by the force of his words, struck home to his conscience. His threatenings of the vengeance of Heaven at the moment of earthly suffering, shook his soul, which had not yet become wholly cruel or obdurate. John became another man; he called to him the metropolitan and all the bishops, and solemnly professed to them his penitence for his sins; and having assembled the people in the public place⁵⁹, he bewailed his errors before them, laying the blame upon his unworthy guardians. With the wonderful reformation of the Tsar every thing around him assumed a different appearance: the guilty boyars were removed; Adasheff, the new and virtuous friend of the Tsar, illustrious not by his birth but by his actions, stood on the nearest step of the throne; and the kingdom flourished. Men of wisdom sat in the councils of the prince, and experienced leaders commanded his armies. But if Adasheff ruled the heart of John, Silvester was the director of his soul. There was something strange in the sudden appearance of this priest from Novogorod in the palace of the prince; it may be supposed that the Metropolitan Macarius, having been personally acquainted with his worth in his former diocese, availed himself of some favourable opportunity to place him about the Tsar. To promote the interest of the Church and of their country was the sole aim of both, and the glory of Russia attested that influence which they exercised during thirty years. The attention of the new government was in the first instance turned to the civil laws. A council of the most experienced boyars, after having examined the code of John the Third, composed a new Statute Book.

John himself, notwithstanding the vices of his youth, had received good instruction, and not being without zeal for the discipline and constitutions of the Church, perceived the errors which had crept into the performance of Divine Service, and the disorders which existed among the spirituality. He convoked another council of all the Russian bishops, presided by the Metropolitan Macarius, and opened the session himself with an affecting speech, in which he exposed the unhappinesses of his earlier years. “My fathers, pastors, and teachers,” said he, “see now every one of you what counsel or discernment is in him, and pray God at the same time for His merciful aid; stir up your understandings, and enlighten yourselves with sound knowledge as to all the divinely-inspired Ordinances, so as to discern in what way the Lord hath delivered them; and me, your son, enlighten and instruct to all godliness, as it ought to be with religious kings, in all righteous laws for the kingdom, in all soundness of faith, and purity; and be ye not slack to establish the whole of orthodox Christianity, that we may keep the law of Christ in all its truth, perfect and inviolate. I for my part shall always be ready, as with one soul, to join and support you either in correcting what is amiss, or confirming what is well established, according as the Holy Ghost shall shew you; if so be I should ever oppose you contrary to the letter or spirit of the Divine canons, do not ye hold your peace at it, but rebuke me; if I should still be disobedient, inhibit me without any manner of fear; so shall my soul live, and the souls of all my subjects.”

John put them in mind how, in the year in which he was crowned, he had given it in charge to all the bishops and hegumens to collect the lives of the saints who had wrought out their salvation in their several dioceses or monasteries, that they might in common receive the honour of the Church, and how that the fruit of their zeal had been the glorification of twenty fresh saints, protectors by their prayers of the land of Russia. Among these were the Metropolitan Jonah, and John, Lord of Novogorod; Sabbatius, and the Zosimi, monks of the Solovetsky, and other recluses, as Dionysius of Gloushits, Paul of Comelsk, and Alexander of Sveersk; Nikon and Paphnutius, the disciples of St. Sergius, and Alexander, the hero of the Neva. The council now repeated and confirmed the former decree that their memories should be celebrated in the Church; and also approved the new Statute Book of civil laws, which was submitted to them for revision.

In the next place, the Tsar desired of them a solution of many questions relating to the external and internal discipline of the Church, to the Church courts, the monastic state, the ceremonies, the chant, the Icons, the sign of the cross, the correction of the books, the morals of the clergy, the Letters of exemption from jurisdiction, the property of the Church, the eradication of many superstitions, &c. To all these questions the council gave a lengthy answer in writing, divided into a hundred chapters, which gave it the name, only too celebrated afterwards, of the Council of the Hundred Chapters. But though, as it seemed, all the ecclesiastical doubts of that time were resolved by these decisions of the council, which Joasaph, the former metropolitan, further revised in the quiet of his cell with the Priest Silvester; though the council itself was presided over by the Metropolitan Macarius, the eloquent writer of the lives of the saints, which he collected together in the Chetee-Menaë⁶⁰; and though the object of the council itself was to eradicate superstitions and abuses; yet, notwithstanding all this, the prejudices and ignorance of the dark age of John shewed themselves in some of the acts of this council, because there was no enlightened eye which could impartially overlook its decisions. The learned Greek Monk, Maximus, was suffering in confinement, and the energy of his spirit was broken; and they did not apply to the œcumenical patriarchs to approve the Council of the Hundred Chapters. In this way it came to pass that certain superstitious customs and local errors were clothed with the sanction of authority, and taking root in time among the people, produced those pernicious schisms with which the Church is even yet afflicted, while, at the same time, that correction of the Church books which had been proposed in the Hundred-chapter council, and which was indeed to be desired, was put off, owing to the troubled state of the kingdom, till the times of the patriarch Nikon, though his predecessors had already before then, by little and little, made some advances towards this great work. There is, still further, one very important circumstance, which throws a shade of suspicion over the Council of the Hundred Chapters. Its acts were never confirmed by the subscription of the Russian bishops; and not only has the original copy of them not been preserved, but none of the chronicles even so much as mention it, before the times of Nikon; and the metropolitan Macarius himself is silent concerning the council, in his Books of the Genealogies, in which he has related the history both of State and Church affairs. It may have been that he did not consent to some of its canons, or that from the loss of the original, the Acts of the council have come down to us with some mutilation in the copies.

In the mean time the internal prosperity of the kingdom shewed itself by victories gained over its enemies: kingdoms and provinces fell one after another at the feet of the youthful Tsar: the fragments of the Golden Horde, which had been broken up in the time of John III. became part of the empire of his grandson. Only a short time before this, the kingdoms of the Crimea and Kazan, which mutually supported each other, had assumed a threatening aspect, and the Khan Devlet Hirey, spreading desolation around him on his march, had approached within a short distance of the capital, to the great alarm of the Council of the Boyars, and of the youthful John; but the same khan, in his turn, fled to the Steppes at the bare rumour that the Tsar, now grown to manhood, was about to take the field. For the last time Kazan rose up in rebellion against the Russian deputy, who was sent thither when the Tartar Queen, Soumbeka, with her young son, were carried away to Moscow. The people of Kazan invited Ediger from Astrachan to be their king, and thus roused the anger of John. Great preparations for war preceded the most important military exploit of those times. On the line of march to the rebellious city, lay the newly-erected fortress of Sviajsk; hortatory letters from the metropolitan addressed to its new colonists, and to the troops which were there assembled, urged them to the religious fulfilment of their duty⁶¹. At length John himself set forth: his brilliant campaign had altogether the appearance of a crusade; the solemnities of the Church services and ceremonies were mingled with the exercises of war. Prayers preceded and concluded every movement. The immense camp of the Russians was pitched within sight of Kazan, and near the tent of the Tsar was pitched the ambulatory tent-church. The attack and defence were both desperate. A mine was carried under the principal tower, and at the moment that during the celebration of the Liturgy, the deacon uttered aloud the words of the Gospel, “there shall be one flock and one shepherd,” a frightful explosion announced that the walls of Kazan had fallen.

John entered in triumph into the conquered city; he himself planted in its centre the first cross, and made the circuit of the walls in procession, with the sacred Banners⁶² and Icons, to consecrate it to the name of Christ. In the space of a few days he built a small church of the Annunciation, which was destined to shed the first rays of enlightenment upon the East: for from thence a wide door was opened for it to hear the good tidings of salvation. Innumerable were the happy consequences of the capture of Kazan, which made the name of John illustrious both in Europe and Asia. The ruler of Siberia offered him tribute: the princes of Gori⁶³, and of Circassia, their homage. Soon after, another Tartar kingdom, that of Astrachan, fell before his arms, making but a trifling resistance. The Cossacks, a new people, which had been formed in the time of his grandfather, from a mixture of tribes, with no other bond of union than the common profession of orthodoxy, about the sources of the Don, and the falls of the Dnieper, harassed Lithuania and the Crimea, and united themselves under Russian leaders to attack the khan. It depended only on the will of John, whether this last remnant of the power of Batius should disappear from our frontiers. The Tsar did not pay due attention to the prudent advice of his nobles, but cast an ambitious eye on Lithuania; and so the Crimea recovered itself, to be the cause of future calamities to our country.

The young Tsar returned with joy from under the walls of Kazan; the birth of his son Demetrius doubled his satisfaction: he took his course straight to the Lavra, to offer up there his thanksgivings and prayers. Two holy men, representatives as it were of other times, met him at the tomb of Sergius; Joasaph, once metropolitan, who had suffered in the days of his childhood, and Maximus, the Greek, who had lingered on in confinement to a cheerless old age. Another meeting of a more joyful kind, and more befitting the conqueror, awaited him on his return to Moscow; the Metropolitan Macarius, with all his clergy, had come out in procession, and were standing to receive him at the gate of the same convent, where formerly his predecessor Cyprian had received the Icon of Vladimir, the pledge of deliverance from Tamerlane. The Tsar in an affecting speech gave an account of all his victories, humbly attributing them to the prayers of the prelate, and in the overflowing of his feelings prostrated himself in front of the procession. Macarius complimented him in return, thanking him in the name of all Russia, and fell at his feet in like manner with his clergy. His last and tenderest meeting was in the Kremlin, where he found his consort Anastasia with their child. His baptism was distinguished by the reception at the same time of three members of the royal family of Kazan into the bosom of the Church, Soumbeka, her son, who was christened Alexander, and Ediger, who had been taken captive, and who was named Simeon, all at their own free choice and desire. The metropolitan himself examined into the sincerity of their conversion.

The new diocese of Kazan was publicly established with great solemnity. The Metropolitan Macarius, the Archbishops Pimen of Novogorod and Nicander of Rostoff, the Bishops Athanasius of Souzdal, two Gourys, of Smolensk, and Riazan, Acacius of Tver, Theodosius of Columna, Niphont of Sarai, and Cyprian of Vologda, in the presence of the court and the foreign ambassadors, elected and consecrated synodically Goury, hegumen of Selijaroff, to be archbishop of Kazan, and gave him precedence next to the archbishop of Novogorod, out of respect to his diocese, formed of a conquered kingdom. The tithe of the revenues of the conquered district, and many domains of the Tsar, were assigned for the support of the prelate, who was accompanied from Moscow to his vessels by a procession with Crosses and Banners. The conversion of many thousands of heathens and Mahometans to the light of Christianity was the fruit of the labours of Goury, which were unceasing while he lived, and he was reckoned after death among the saints. About this same time Macarius presided at another synod of less note, which condemned the beginning of a heresy which was creeping in amongst us from Lithuania. Their rejection of the canons and ordinances of the Church, her ceremonies and Icons, and their questioning the Divinity of the Saviour, discovered the guilt of Baksheen and his little knot of followers⁶⁴. They were delivered over to an anathema, after they had been exhorted to no purpose by Artemius, hegumen of The Trinity, who afterwards himself fell under suspicion, and was banished to the Solovetsky monastery. It is supposed that Cassian also, the bishop of Riazan, was deprived of his diocese for the same cause. The successor of Artemius, the Hegumen Eleutherius, was the first who was raised to the rank of archimandrite, and his Lavra was honoured with precedence over all the monasteries of Russia, as a mark of the special zeal of John for the great saint Sergius. His piety and his gratitude to the Lord for the victories which had been vouchsafed to him were outwardly at least manifested, besides liberal alms and offerings, by his erection of the most magnificent of all the Churches of Moscow before the Gates of the Saviour⁶⁵, which lead into the Kremlin, by the name of the Protection of the Most Holy Virgin⁶⁶. This church, which is better known by the name of The Blessed Basil, who reposes in it, strikes the eye by its extraordinary mass of building, half oriental, half Gothic, a glorious monument of victory, and a sort of image of the conquered city of Kazan, which had come under the shadow of the antique sanctuary of Moscow.

Soon afterwards, a dangerous illness, which brought John to the verge of the grave, served for the commencement of the future miseries of Russia; for when apparently on his death-bed, he experienced a repetition of the same treasonable factions of the boyars which had troubled his minority. Even those nobles who were nearest to him refused to swear allegiance to his child Demetrius, from fear of the anarchy which might ensue from a long minority, and inclined to the side of his cousin-german Vladimir. However, the Tsar, on his recovery, appeared to forget these signs of a rebellious spirit, and in fulfilment of a vow which he had made, set out for the Lavra, Piesnosh, and Bielo-ozero, to offer up his devotions in those monasteries. The Greek Monk Maximus now appears for the last time, at the termination of his thirty years’ sufferings. In consequence of some secret suggestion, of which the particulars are unknown, he warned John against prolonging his journey, and even foretold to him the premature death of his son, but he was not listened to. At Piesnosh, another remarkable meeting awaited the Tsar, which proved destructive to his peace of mind. There was living there in disgrace an ex-bishop of Columna, named Cassian, who had been the friend of the Great Prince Basil, and the Metropolitan Daniel. The old man, whose heart was hardened by years and confinement, in a conversation with John gave him advice, which only too well suited his disposition, not to keep any one about him wiser than himself, that he might be free to rule as he pleased. The seed which was thus sown in due time produced fatal fruit.

The Tsar was compensated for the loss of Demetrius by the birth of two other sons, John and Theodore, but nothing could make up to him for the premature decease of the virtuous Anastasia, with whom all his happiness vanished. The fiery temper of his second wife Mary, a princess of Cherkask, and the intrigues of his nobles, caused the ruin of his best friends. Silvester and Adasheff were accused of having poisoned the Tsaritsa Anastasia. Both of them foreseeing their fate, endeavoured to escape into retirement; Silvester received the tonsure at Bielo-ozero, but he was summoned from thence to be tried at Moscow, and was confined in the Solovetsky; Adasheff, who some time previously had asked and obtained for himself the command of the army in Livonia, was deprived of it, and died in prison at Dorpat.

The war in Livonia still raged at that time, and was glorious to our arms, for the fortified lines and towns of the Order fell under the assaults of our generals Courbsky, Serebrian, and Adasheff, and Fellin itself, their capital, was taken, though it proved of no lasting advantage to the empire; John retained only a few towns and the bare title of Lord of Livonia. The Order, however, was crushed; its former Master, and his knights, languished in the prisons of Moscow; but the last Grand Master, Ketler, seeing no prospect of safety on any side, surrendered himself up to Sigismund king of Poland, and abdicated his military dignity as chief of the Sword-bearers, to receive in exchange the duchy of Courland. A part of his former dominions on the sea coast went to Sweden: and from this time there began a long continuance of hostilities between those two powers. But though Lithuania was now permanently united to Poland, and they could bring all their forces in common to bear against Russia, still the successes of John, up to the death of the feeble King Sigismund, were brilliant. He himself took Polotsk, and with this exploit terminated his personal glory as a warrior. The bishop of this ancient Russian diocese was sent with the prisoners to Moscow, and Trypho, of Souzdal, was appointed as archbishop there, for a short time, till it was recovered again by the Poles. A meeting similar to that, which welcomed him after the capture of Kazan, awaited the victor on his return; though the change which had already shewn itself in his character repressed all feelings of joy in the hearts of his subjects.

The Metropolitan Macarius once more received the Tsar with a complimentary address⁶⁷ in Moscow, and soon after died. A witness of the first glorious half of the reign of John, he was spared by a merciful providence the pain of beholding the bloody horrors of the latter half, and departed, while he could yet do so, in peace, leaving behind him the blessed memory of a prudent pastor, who had directed his sovereign as far as possible to what was good. A lover of learning, but with the slender opportunities of that age, he innocently became the cause of much evil by the Council of the Hundred Chapters; but on the other hand he also rendered essential service by his learned labours, by his continuation of the Annals of Cyprian, his translation of the Greek Menæa⁶⁸, and his establishment of the first printing press in Moscow, where were printed in his time the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles. Superstitious arguments against printing, which had excited the opposition of the hand-writers, prevented its making any further progress after the death of its patron Macarius, and though there was an edition of the Gospels printed afterwards by order of the Tsar, still he left to the illustrious Prince Constantine of Ostrog, deputygovernor of Kieff, the opportunity and the glory of printing there for the first time the entire Bible in Slavonic.

In Lithuania, after the death of Joseph Saltan, the line of orthodox metropolitans of Kieff was continued. His successor Jonah II., elected by the intercession of the Great Princess Helena, was not inferior to him in zeal; he confirmed in orthodoxy many of the Lithuanian princes, and this his success was the reason, that the King of Poland at the Diet of Grodno forbade the appointment of the orthodox to be senators, or to fill any of the higher offices of the state: at the same time, however, he left them the right of electing their own primates. The metropolitans who succeeded after him, and who were confirmed by the benediction of the patriarchs of Constantinople, were Joseph II., previously bishop of Polotsk, Macarius II., who had been one of the court chaplains of the Great Princess Helena, Silvester, Jonas III., in whose time the union of the principality of Lithuania with the kingdom of Poland was completed, by the constitution of the Diet of Lublin, in the person of Sigismund Augustus, and lastly, Elias; these, assisted by the victories of the sovereigns of Russia, maintained a strong opposition against the influence of Rome, and against the Lutheran heresy, which had penetrated into the provinces on our western frontiers, where the Latin confession of faith seduced many, even among the members of the clergy.

XLI. Athanasius

In Moscow, after Macarius, the Archimandrite Athanasius, confessor to the Tsar, was elected to be metropolitan, and a synodal letter confirmed to him and to his successors the privilege of wearing the white cowl, which his predecessor had worn as having been before Lord of Novogorod. But Athanasius did not remain long in his chair. Alarmed at the moral change which had taken place in his spiritual son, he after a year retired into the Novospassky, or New Monastery of the Saviour, built by John III., in place of the original Spassky monastery of his great grandfather Kalita.

The sudden retirement of the Tsar with all his family to the village of Alexandroff⁶⁹, upon the pretext of being in danger from his subjects, marked the commencement of the horrors of his reign. The capital, in consternation, sent a deputation of prelates and boyars to entreat their sovereign to return. He yielded, but only on condition that they were not to interfere between him and his victims; and the heads of the chief among the nobles fell. In a fit of incomprehensible phrensy, John divided all Russia into two parts; one he called his own peculiar property, or Personalty⁷⁰, in which he included many towns, and quarters of the capital itself, and this he kept under his own personal government; the other part, which he called Provincial, he committed to the boyars, and this he on all occasions sacrificed to his Personalty. He surrounded himself with a guard of six thousand reckless youths, with whom he went about the towns and villages, giving them up to fire, and sword, and insult, so that his fearful body-guard of “Peculiars” got the name among the people of the Black, from that outer⁷¹ darkness out of which they seemed to have sprung.

Avoiding the capital he built himself cells in Alexandroff, with halls and a magnificent chapel, and surrounded it with a wall in imitation of a monastery. There, habited in the black mantle of a monk, with which as if in derision he also dressed his bloodthirsty fraternity, he zealously followed the whole Rule of the Church, that he might stifle the reproaches of his conscience, praying and inflicting cruel punishments, going out from church to superintend the rack. Strange play of the human heart! The religious habits of childhood which John had imbibed with his mother’s milk, the external form of religion which had become part of his nature, without having any hold upon or finding any echo in his heart, continually pierced through the hard and coarse covering of his passions, which in their turn had become his second nature. Deeply read in the Scriptures, and master of a powerful style in writing, from his terrible retreat he sent abroad fierce letters to the monasteries all around, accusing them of neglecting their Rule, and relaxing the strict discipline of the monastic life, of which he shewed himself the most zealous maintainer.

He himself also met with a determined accuser, one who was to wear a crown too, though no other than the crown of martyrdom, over the pastoral mitre. The mild and timid Athanasius had retired, having no strength to bear up against such a storm. The choice of the Tsar fell on Germanus, archbishop of Kazan. It was in vain that the pious old man refused the office: he was ordered to occupy the apartments of the primate, and await the public ceremony of his consecration. Sensible of the duties of his calling, Germanus desired to have an interview previously with the Tsar, and in a pastoral admonition, ventured to try to turn him away from the ruinous course he was following. John, bursting into a passion, drove him out of his palace in the Kremlin to his former diocese, and proceeded to a new election.

XLII. St. Philip

John then called to mind an old acquaintance of his childhood, the holy Hegumen Philip, of the noble family of Kolicheff. He had long since quitted the vanities of the world, and had retired to the wild solitude of the Solovetsky monastery, where the strict life of the monk did not prevent his occupying himself with the regulation of his own distant convent, or with diffusing the light of Christianity over the shores of the White sea. The fame of the holy life of Philip put it into the Tsar’s mind to summon him to his own presence, upon the ground that he needed his spiritual counsel. With bitter tears the old man quitted his retirement, and, alarmed at the offer of so exalted a station, entreated not to be torn from his cell, and from the study of the holy Fathers. He understood the duties of the office to which he was called, and foresaw also what would be his own fate. The first thing he did was to refuse to recognise the ruinous distinction of the Tsar’s “Personalty,” which deprived him of part of his flock. He implored the bishops to oppose themselves firmly to such an injurious division; but some of them kept silence from fear, others connived at what was done, to gain the favour of men; all besought him not to irritate their frantic sovereign by attempting to withdraw himself, nor abandon the kingdom and the Church to his wrath; and in deference to their hopes, which were destined to be disappointed, Philip consented, not wishing to incur the imputation of pride and obstinacy. He knew that fresh horrors would be sure soon to bring him face to face with John, and give him an opportunity of speaking to him the words of truth.

On the very day of his consecration he gave utterance to words of admonition and reproof in the answer which he made from his chair to the customary address of recognition by the Tsar. “For silence,” said the zealous pastor, “lays sin upon the soul, and brings death to the whole people.” John, still under the influence of his first impression, listened quietly to the metropolitan, and put on a show of courteousness towards him, or, to speak more correctly, of endurance; the executions ceased for a time, though that was indeed but a short one. Very soon they began again with fresh horrors in the wretched capital, and the cries of the boyars, who fled to Philip for protection, deeply wrung his soul.

Once, on a Sunday, while he was celebrating the liturgy in the cathedral of the Assumption, the Tsar entered with a crowd of his “Peculiars,” dressed in strange attire, and presented himself before the primate’s chair to receive the blessing. But the prelate kept his eyes steadily fixed on the Icon of the Saviour, and appeared not to notice the approach of the sovereign. The boyars announced to him that John was there. “I do not recognise the Tsar,” he exclaimed, “in any such dress; I do not recognise him either in the acts of his government. What is this that thou hast done, O Tsar, to put off from thee the form of thine honour? Fear the judgments of God. Here we are offering up the bloodless sacrifice to the Lord; while behind the altar there is flowing the innocent blood of Christian men.” John boiled over with fury, and tried to stop his lips with menaces; but these had no terrors for the holy man. “I am a stranger and a pilgrim upon earth, as all my fathers were,” he quietly replied, “and I am ready to suffer for the truth. Where would be my faith if I kept silence?”

John left the church almost beside himself with passion; but still, notwithstanding the suggestions of those about him, some secret awe restrained him from laying hands on the saint; he only avoided his presence, and took care never to meet him but in the churches, and there he heard himself reproved. A procession brought them both together upon the walls of the Däevichy convent, and the metropolitan, as he turned himself towards the people, perceived one of the “Peculiars” with his head covered; he pointed out the offender to John, and complained of this Tartar habit of his suite. But the favourite of the Tsar had already taken off his tafia⁷², and in his turn accused Philip of calumny. John at length felt determined to throw off the yoke of his virtues, by which he felt himself oppressed, and sought immediately for something like a ground of accusation against him. He sent Paphnutius, bishop of Souzdal, to the Solovetsky monastery, to make enquiries respecting the life of Philip on the spot itself, where the greater part of it had been spent in spiritual exercises. But none of the community dared to calumniate their former superior; only one man, the Hegumen Paisius, was induced by flattery and threats to accuse him. The Tsar, overjoyed, cited the metropolitan as a criminal before a spiritual council, where, in the number of his judges, sat the Lord of Novogorod, the ambitious Pimen, destined soon after to be rewarded as he deserved, with Philotheus of Riazan, Paphnutius of Souzdal, and others who were equally creatures of John. Imprisonment was the punishment they awarded him. St. Philip had foretold this to Pimen; and laying aside, of his own accord, his mantle and white cowl, he joyfully surrendered them to the Tsar, begging to be restored to his retired monastery and quiet, and imploring the bishops to stand up firmly for the Church of Christ. But John, who had been publicly reproved, wished to take an equally public and triumphant revenge. He compelled the metropolitan to perform once more the service of the liturgy. A crowd of the “Peculiars” rushed into the church with a shout after the service was begun, when the prelate was now standing before the altar quietly offering up his last sacrifice, and ready also to offer up himself for the name of Christ; they tore his robes from him, and left nothing on him but a shirt, and so dragged him to prison. The old man made the sign of the cross, and gave his benediction to the people as they were taking him along, and only repeated this one word, “Pray!” and at the doors of the cathedral, he exclaimed, “I rejoice that I have received all this for the sake of the Church. Alas! the times of her widowhood are coming, when her shepherds shall be despised as hirelings.”

On the next day, in the royal palace, and in the presence of the Tsar, Philip’s sentence of deposition was announced to him. After having heard his own condemnation unmoved, he once more, for the last time, implored the Tsar to remember the good examples of his ancestors, and cease from his murders. In the monastery of St. Nicholas, where he was temporarily confined, he received as a present from John the bloody head of his nephew. Philip blessed it, and returned it to the sender. A week afterwards, he was conducted, under a strong guard, to the Otroch monastery in Tver, where he continued in his narrow cell in unceasing prayer till the time of his martyrdom.

XLIII. Cyrill III

Cyrill, a retiring monk, the hegumen of the Novinsky⁷³ monastery, was consecrated in the room of Philip, but neither Church nor State were sensible of his presence on the throne of Moscow. He and his successor, Anthony, who had been archbishop of Polotsk, glided like shadows through the gloom of the latter dreadful years of John. After St. Philip, they shewed as if they had been already dead⁷⁴. John made an attack on his own city of Novogorod, while he had still upon his hands an unsuccessful war with Sigismund; suspicion of their inclining to the king of Poland served him as a pretence for laying waste his own towns. Every thing was given up to fire and sword on his march to the Ilmen, beginning from Kleen. In the midst of the desolation which he had caused in Tver, the torturer did not forget his former victim; he sent his worthy assistant, Maliout Skouratoff, as if for Philip’s blessing, to the Otroch monastery. But St. Philip quietly said to him, “Execute thy mission;” and was strangled in his cell, suffering for the truth like another John the Baptist. The Church of Russia has been distinguished by many great prelates, but among them all there is only this one martyr, and his glory is incorruptible, even as are his holy relics themselves. The living words which he spake have kept as it were life and power even in his dead body, and this immoveable pillar which supports the Church crumbles not away⁷⁵. On four such pillars the Church of Moscow and of all Russia rests: Peter, Alexis, Jonah, Philip. Who can shake so firm a foundation? The relics of the holy martyr lie in the cathedral of the Assumption: in vain the Solovetsky convent desired to have them in the days of the mild Theodore, that he who had aforetime chosen the rocky cave of the ocean to be his lone retreat, might rest within hearing of its hoary waves. It was right that the good shepherd, who had laid down his life for the sheep, should repose on the spot where he had laboured and suffered.

From Tver John pursued his march, marking his track with blood. His band preceded him in the commission of murders at Novogorod; the monks and the wealthiest of the citizens were put to the torture, and many were unable to support the blows. Of the clergy alone more than five hundred suffered; the property of the monasteries was plundered, and the common people were cast by thousands into the Volkhoff; Pimen, the Lord, went out to meet him with a procession and crosses to the bridge. The Tsar called him a traitor, and fiercely ordered him to go and celebrate the liturgy in the cathedral of St. Sophia. From the church John went to him to dinner in the refectory, and at a given signal his Peculiars rushed upon the archbishop with a shout, seized all the boyars, and put them under guard; he himself was sent to the village of Alexandroff, and there deprived of his dignity, and shut up in the monastery at Toula. Novogorod meantime was filled with blood, and the number of deaths was still further swelled by a famine and pestilence which followed in the train of the executions; so that it literally lay desolate after the terrible visit of John. He collected there a vast spoil, but fled out of the monastery of Khoutinsk, struck with a mysterious dread, when he wished to touch the shrine of the venerable Barlaam. After having sacrilegiously plundered some religious houses, he devoutly adorned others: the Trinity Lavra and the monastery of St. Cyrill were the exclusive objects of his zeal. Two cathedrals, of the Assumption, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost, were built by him within the Lavra, while the convent of Bielo-ozero was fortified with strong walls, within which he hoped to find security from the incursions of the Tartars, and from the attacks of his own subjects; for there he intended to receive the tonsure, and there he deposited his treasures, the spoils which he had taken from Kazan and Novogorod⁷⁶.

Pskoff narrowly escaped sharing the fate of the ancient capital of Rurik. Already the terrible destroyer stood before her walls, and her last night seemed to overshadow the trembling city: all the citizens passed it in prayer; the bell sounded⁷⁷ for mattins, and the tranquillizing sound softened his cruel heart; John relented, and became calm; the people met him with bread and salt; the mad hermit Salos in his cell offered him instead a piece of raw flesh. “I am a Christian,” said the Tsar in astonishment, “and do not eat flesh during the Great Fast!” “At all events thou drinkest man’s blood,” replied the daring hermit; and John, confounded, did not answer him a word, but hastened away from Pskoff. No agreeable guest awaited him at Moscow. The warlike khan, Devlet Hirey, with the Horde of the Crimea, had passed his generals on the Oka, approached close to Moscow, and burned all the suburbs. The Metropolitan Cyrill was very near being suffocated by the smoke in the Kremlin; John fled. A second incursion of the khan was less successful. The illustrious commander Vorotinsky, destined afterwards to fall a victim to the ingratitude of John, completely defeated the khan at no great distance from the capital. The Tsar in the mean time again retired to Novogorod, but this time without any shedding of blood, as a humble worshipper on the same spot where he had before raged a cruel persecutor. He brought with him, for the consolation of the citizens, a new Lord, Leonidas.

Troubled in conscience, John sought as it were involuntarily to place himself under the shadow of the Church to find a refuge from the storm within, and was ever filling it with his atrocities; so that at each step of his life we find acts of religion closely joined with murders, and there glimmer in a strange mixture about him at one time the forms of prelates, at another of his Peculiars. After he had put St. Philip to death, and deprived Pimen, it was a strange sight to see the same man, who had thus given himself up to all the fury of his own passions, humbly asking of a synod of bishops for a dispensation to contract a fourth marriage. They granted him the dispensation, contrary to the canons of the Church, and imposed on him a certain penance⁷⁸, but said nothing of the torrents of blood which he had shed. This occurred after the death of Cyrill, during the vacancy of the metropolitan throne. Anthony, who was elevated to his place, presided in another council, which, at the demand of the Tsar, prohibited the monasteries from acquiring any more landed property, and restored to the sovereign those properties which had been given them by the Great Princes of Moscow. The distressed circumstances of Russia compelled her to have recourse to this measure.

XLIV. Anthony

The odious Personalty, which had cost so much blood, was at length done away with, but the blood of the higher dignitaries, both in Church and State, did not cease to flow. Among those who suffered were Leonidas, Lord of Novogorod, and Cornelius, the pious hegumen of the Pechersky⁷⁹, who was more fortunate in his meeting with John before the threatened destruction of Pskoff, than at his own convent at the time of his campaign in Livonia; also Theodoret, a just man, who had formerly brought him the benedictory letter of the patriarch on his accession to the throne, and since that time had retired to the north, where he founded a monastery in the midst of the Lopars, whom he baptized. While John thus acted himself the part of an enemy in the interior of his kingdom, new and powerful enemies arose from without. The unhappy district of Livonia continued to be the occasion and the theatre of a bloody contest. On one side, it was desolated by the armies of John, who aspired to become himself its Lord, while he conferred the nominal title of king of Livonia on the Danish Prince Magnus, whom he had married to his niece; on the other side, the Swedes threw themselves upon it, and endeavoured all they could to obtain permanent possession of the sea coasts; there appeared also a third powerful invader, stronger and more active than his rivals, in Stephen Batori⁸⁰, the new king of Poland, who was elected from the Seven Towns after the flight of Henry of Valois. Not long before this, the Estates of Lithuania and Poland had offered the crown of those countries to Theodore, the youthful son of John; but the ambition of his father, who desired to appropriate it to himself, lost it to them both. Exactly the same thing was destined some years later to be repeated, on the part of Sigismund and his son Vladislaff of Poland, with respect to Russia. The hero Batori, who had grown grey in battles, by the glory of his victories blunted the sword of our leaders. The ancient city of Polotsk, notwithstanding the brave defence of its inhabitants, who were encouraged by their Archbishop Cyprian, was obliged to surrender. The enemy advanced even into our own provinces, and pitched his camp under the walls of Pskoff; but our brave commander, Shouesky, beat off all his assaults, and rendered a long siege fruitless.

An incomprehensible pusillanimity, caused by the inward trouble of his conscience, took possession of the soul of John. Though he had a numerous army of his own, he sought aid from the mediation of the foreign powers, with whom, during the whole course of his long reign, he kept up relations of friendly and commercial intercourse. The emperor and the pope intervened in the affairs of Poland. Gregory XIII. took care not to neglect an opportunity so favourable to his views: he despatched to the contending parties the Jesuit Anthony Possevin, who, in his quality of mediator, passed from one camp to the other, and succeeded in negociating an armistice on terms disadvantageous to Russia; for after so many and great sacrifices, she gave up Livonia and Polotsk to Lithuania. The wily Anthony used all his efforts to bring John to admit the Florentine Union, and in every interview which he had with him on political matters contrived to let fall some words about the union of the Churches; but John shewed no less address in evading all discussion, as he wished not at that time to say any thing which might irritate the legate, or prejudice his own affairs; but when he was relieved from his apprehensions by the conclusion of the armistice, he gave him more decided answers: sometimes, unable to restrain the violence of his temper, he expressed himself strongly on the ambition and tyranny of the Romish pontiffs, and then again fell to a calmer tone on perceiving the displeasure of Possevin; yet, notwithstanding his repeated instances, John persisted in refusing to permit the Venetian merchants to have Latin churches in his dominions, and at length honourably dismissed the ambassador with rich presents. The visit of Anthony, though it produced no effect in Moscow, left behind it deep traces in Lithuania, where his zealous exhortations and wily policy produced some years later that Unia, which appears as the source of such fatal mischief in the annals of our Church and country.

The subjugation of Siberia by Yermak gives us the last glimpse of the sunshine of John’s greatness, who became more renowned in the East than in the West. A third Tartar kingdom was now laid at the foot of his throne: there remained only the menacing Horde of the Crimea to save the memory of the Mongols from total extinction. But John himself prematurely descended to the tomb, having been consumed by the inward fire of his passions during all his life. He was violently affected at the wretched end of his son John: the phrensied father struck him with his staff in an access of passion, and only came to himself again over his corpse. Rich alms for the good of his soul were sent to Sinai and Athos, and to the Holy Sepulchre. There remained to succeed him only the feeble Theodore, and Demetrius yet a child, the fruit of his seventh marriage, whose name was to be sadly memorable to Russia. At length, John’s mental disease communicated itself to his body. Surrounded by so many shades of murdered men, he set as a blood-red sun in mists. At the hour of his decease, the Metropolitan Dionysius, knowing his sovereign’s wish, approached to give him the tonsure in the name of his favourite monastery of Bielo-ozero: and so from the Terrible John he became the simple Monk Jonah, and rendered up his spirit to the Heavenly judge of his dreadful reign on earth.

XLV. Dionysius

The peaceful reign of Theodore succeeded as a calm after the storm. In his person the race of Rurik took its leave of Russia, after having conferred on her its last benefits, and its parting with us is the more marked from the repose of the interval which occurred between the horrors of the reign of John and the civil wars of the Pretenders. Five boyars of the council had been left by the late powerful monarch as guardians to his feeble son: the Princes Shouesky, Mistislafsky, and Belsky, and with these his relatives or connections Nicetas Romanoff, his uncle, and his brother-in-law Boris Godounoff, afterwards to be Tsar, who soon seized the reins of government, and got rid of the other nobles. The child Demetrius, with his mother, the Tsaritsa Martha, and all her court, were sent, as if in order to his education there, to the appanage of Ouglich. After the example of his father, Theodore was crowned to his kingdom; the Metropolitan Dionysius placed on his head the crown of the Monomachi, and anointed him with the holy ointment⁸¹, according to the order for the coronation of the Greek emperors, which John had received from the patriarch. By the prudent dispositions of Godounoff, the state prospered, and was at peace with the neighbouring powers of Sweden and Poland, where the aged Batori still lived on to enjoy his glory, and extended itself in the direction of the East. The building of Archangel, and of Oural, of the open town of the Cossacks on the Volga, and of fortresses on the Terek⁸², marked the extreme limits of the empire. Siberia, which had been abandoned after its conquest by Yermak, was a second time subdued by the generals of the Tsar, who established themselves in Tobolsk, near Isker, its ancient capital. The king, whose name was Kouchoum, fled to the steppes. His sons were already captives at the court of Theodore, with Simeon, of the family of Kazan, who had been king of Kasimoff, and who had received instead the title of Great Prince of Tver. Besides these, yet one more kingdom submitted itself, the ancient Iberia, which had been crushed between the Persians and the Turks. Its king, Alexander, took the oath of allegiance to Russia, and Theodore despatched priests into his provinces to maintain⁸³ the influence of Christianity and civilization among the inhabitants, who had been so long and so severely tried by suffering. The ambition of Boris was the only thing that broke for a time the tranquillity of the palace in the Kremlin, by exciting the hatred of the boyars, on whom he in return revenged himself by throwing them into confinement. The Prince Shouesky, in concert with the metropolitan, opposed the regent, and wished to persuade Theodore to separate himself from Irene, the sister of Godounoff, on the ground of her barrenness, as his grandfather had done by Salmone; but their design became known. In vain Dionysius endeavoured to reconcile Shouesky with Boris, and thought that he had succeeded: the reconciliation was not lasting, and the renowned defender of Pskoff ended his days in a dungeon at Bielo-ozero. The metropolitan himself, a man of a decided character, who was surnamed Grammaticus for his learning and eloquence, suffered on account of his illustrious friend. He ventured to accuse Godounoff to the Tsar of arbitrariness and persecution, but was unable to stand against his power. Dionysius was deprived of his chair, as was also his faithful friend and vicar Barlaam, archbishop of the Steeps, and was sent to Novogorod, and there died in his former monastery of Khoutinsk. In accordance with the desire of the regent, Job, archbishop of Rostoff, who had been not long before bishop of Columna, was raised to the chair of Moscow and all Russia. From this point begin the annals of the patriarchs.

Previous · Contents · Next